The contribution of Big Data to social science is not limited to data availability but includes the introduction of analytical approaches that have been developed in computer science, and in particular in machine learning. This brings about a new ‘culture’ of statistical modelling that bears considerable potential for the social scientist. This argument is illustrated with a brief discussion of model-based recursive partitioning which can bridge the theory and data-driven approach. Such a method is an example of how this new (...) approach can help revise models that work for the full dataset: it can be used for evaluating different models, a traditional weakness of the ‘traditional’ statistical approach used in social science. (shrink)

Rabbi Simone Luzzatto was the first thinker of the early modern period to put forth new political and philosophical ideas under the banner of scepticism, helping to make the Jews an integral part of society.

Sceptical Paths gathers a variety of innovative studies that inquire into the presence and function of sceptical elements, strategies, and approaches in various traditions throughout Ancient, Medieval, Modern, and contemporary philosophy. Special at.

The Yearbook mirrors the annual activities of staff and visiting fellows of the Maimonides Centre and reports on symposia, workshops, and lectures taking place at the Centre. Although aimed at a wider audience, the yearbook also contains academic articles and book reviews on scepticism in Judaism and scepticism in general. Staff, visiting fellows, and other international scholars are invited to contribute.

The _Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion_ is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles, which seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies.

Introduction: in search of a Jewish renaissance -- Jewish philosophy: humanist roots of a contradiction in terms -- The prophetic-poetic dimension of philosophy: the ars poetica and Immanuel of Rome -- Leone Ebreo's concept of Jewish philosophy -- Conceptions of history: Azariah de Rossi -- Scientific thought and the exegetical mind, with an essay on the life and works of Rabbi Judah Loew -- Mathematical and biblical exegesis: Jewish sources of Athanasius Kircher's musical theory -- Creating geographical and political utopias: (...) the ten lost tribes and the east -- Ceremonial law: history of a philosophical-political concept -- The city and the ghetto: Simone Luzzatto and the development of Jewish political thought -- Body of conversion and immortality of the soul: Sara Copio Sullam, the 'Beautiful Jewess'. (shrink)

The philosophical and exegetical oeuvre, biography and legacy of the Jewish-Italian Renaissance Rabbi Obadiah Sforno (c. 1475–1550) are revisited for the first time by international scholars presenting in-depth studies on the thoughts of a man “between two worlds”.

The automated parsing of 130,213 news articles about the 2012 US presidential elections produces a network formed by the key political actors and issues, which were linked by relations of support and opposition. The nodes are formed by noun phrases and links by verbs, directly expressing the action of one node upon the other. This network is studied by applying insights from several theories and techniques, and by combining existing tools in an innovative way, including: graph partitioning, centrality, assortativity, hierarchy (...) and structural balance. The analysis yields various patterns. First, we observe that the fundamental split between the Republican and Democrat camps can be easily detected by network partitioning, which provides a strong validation check of the approach adopted, as well as a sound way to assign actors and topics to one of the two camps. Second, we identify the most central nodes of the political camps. We also learnt that Clinton played a more central role than Biden in the Democrat camp; the overall campaign was much focused on economy and rights; the Republican Party is the most divisive subject in the campaign, and is portrayed more negatively than the Democrats; and, overall, the media reported positive statements more frequently for the Democrats than the Republicans. This is the first study in which political positions are automatically extracted and derived from a very large corpus of online news, generating a network that goes well beyond traditional word-association networks by means of richer linguistic analysis of texts. (shrink)

The Maimonides Review of Philosophy and Religion is an annual collection of double-blind peer-reviewed articles that seeks to provide a broad international arena for an intellectual exchange of ideas between the disciplines of philosophy, theology, religion, cultural history, and literature and to showcase their multifarious junctures within the framework of Jewish studies. Contributions to the Review place special thematic emphasis on scepticism within Jewish thought and its links to other religious traditions and secular worldviews. The Review is interested in the (...) tension at the heart of matters of reason and faith, rationalism and mysticism, theory and practice, narrativity and normativity, doubt and dogma. (shrink)

This paper reports the framework, method and main findings of an analysis of cultural milieus in 4 European countries. The analysis is based on a questionnaire applied to a sample built through a two-step procedure of post-hoc random selection from a broader dataset based on an online survey. Responses to the questionnaire were subjected to multidimensional analysis-a combination of Multiple Correspondence Analysis and Cluster Analysis. We identified 5 symbolic universes, that correspond to basic, embodied, affect-laden, generalized worldviews. People in this (...) study see the world as either a) an ordered universe;b) a matter of interpersonal bond;c) a caring society;d) consisting of a niche of belongingness;e) a hostile place. These symbolic universes were also interpreted as semiotic capital: they reflect the capacity of a place to foster social and civic development. Moreover, the distribution of the symbolic universes, and therefore social and civic engagement, is demonstrated to be variable across the 4 countries in the analysis. Finally, we develop a retrospective reconstruction of the distribution of symbolic universes as well as the interplay between their current state and past, present and future socio-institutional scenarios. (shrink)

Scepticism has been the driving force in the development of Greco-Roman culture in the past, and the impetus for far-reaching scientific achievements and philosophical investigation. Early Jewish culture, in contrast, avoided creating consistent representations of its philosophical doctrines. Sceptical notions can nevertheless be found in some early Jewish literature such as the Book of Ecclesiastes. One encounters there expressions of doubt with respect to Divine justice or even Divine involvement in earthly affairs. During the first centuries of the common era, (...) however, Jewish thought, as reflected in rabbinic works, was engaged in persistent intellectual activity devoted to the laws, norms, regulations, exegesis and other traditional areas of Jewish religious knowledge. An effort to detect sceptical ideas in ancient Judaism, therefore, requires a closer analysis of this literary heritage and its cultural context. This volume of collected essays seeks to tackle the question of scepticism in an Early Jewish context, including Ecclesiastes and other Jewish Second Temple works, rabbinic midrashic and talmudic literature, and reflections of Jewish thought in early Christian and patristic writings. Contributors are: Tali Artman, Geoffrey Herman, Reuven Kiperwasser, Serge Ruzer, Giuseppe Veltri, Cana Werman, and Casten Wilke. (shrink)

The areas of interest of the scholar of religious studies, Karl E. Grozinger, are diverse. His research is concentrated on the religious and cultural history of Judaism throughout the ages: Israel in antiquity, the era of rabbinical traditional literature, philosophy of religion during the Middle Ages, the kabbalistic tradition, as well as Jewish thinkers and devout movements in contemporary times. On the occasion of Professor Grozinger's seventieth birthday, numerous scholars present the first fruits of their current research as a first (...) look into the tendencies of future research in Jewish studies. In accordance with this scholar's broad interests, the volume Jewish Lifeworlds and Jewish Thought, edited by Nathanael Riemer, is comprised of contributions to a wide variety of topics of Jewish cultural history.With contributions by Hermann Lichtenberger, Hanna Liss, Ronit Meroz, Yoav Elstein, Susanne Talabardon, Nathanael Riemer, Giuseppe Veltri, Dirk Westerkamp, Thomas Meyer, Daniel Jutte, Frederek Musall, Robert Jutte, J. Friedrich Battenberg, Admiel Kosman, Rella Kushelevsky, Elvira Grozinger, Simon Bronner, Avidov Lipsker, Jascha Nemtsov, Rebekka Denz, Micha Brumlik, Micha? Galas, Manja Herrmann, Hans-Michael Haussig, Anat Feinberg, Adam Lipszyc, Vivian Liska, Julius H. Schoeps, Edward D'browa, Ewa Geller, Manfred Voigts, Mordechai Lewy and Stanislaw Krajewski. (shrink)

We provide a full characterization of computational error states for information systems. The class of errors considered is general enough to include human rational processes, logical reasoning, scientific progress and data processing in some functional programming languages. The aim is to reach a full taxonomy of error states by analysing the recovery and processing of data. We conclude by presenting machine-readable checking and resolve algorithms.

The process of completing, correcting and prioritising specifications is an essential but very complex task for the maintenance and improvement of software systems. The preservation of functionalities and the ability to accommodate changes are main objectives of the software development cycle to guarantee system reliability. Logical theories able to fully model such processes are still insufficient. In this paper we propose a full formalisation of such operations on software systems inspired by the Alchourrón–Gärdenfors–Makinson paradigm for belief revision of human epistemic (...) states. We represent specifications as finite sets of formulas equipped with a priority relation that models functional entrenchment of properties. We propose to handle specification incompleteness through ordered expansion, inconsistency through ordered safe contraction and prioritisation through revision with reordering, and model all three in an algorithmic fashion. We show how the system satisfies basic properties of the AGM paradigm, including Levi’s and Harper’s identities. We offer a concrete example and complexity results for the inference and model checking problems on revision. We conclude by describing resilience and evolvability of software systems based on such revision operators. (shrink)

The notion of subject matter is a key concern of contemporary philosophy of language and logic. A central task for a theory of subject matter is to characterise the notion of sentential subject matter, that is, to assign to each sentence of a given language a subject matter that may count as its subject matter. In this paper, we elaborate upon David Lewis’ account of subject matter. Lewis’ proposal is simple and elegant but lacks a satisfactory characterisation of sentential subject (...) matter. Drawing on linguistic literature on focus and on the question under discussion, we offer a neo-Lewisian account of subject matter, which retains all the virtues of Lewis’ but also includes an attractive characterisation of sentential subject matter. (shrink)

Software-intensive science challenges in many ways our current scientific methods. This affects significantly our notion of science and scientific interpretation of the world, driving at the same time the philosophical debate. We consider some issues prompted by SIS in the light of the philosophical categories of ontology and epistemology.

This book is a systematic analysis of John R. Searle’s philosophy of mind. Searle’s view of mind, as a set of subjective _and_ biologically embodied processes, can account for our being part of nature _qua_ mindful beings. This model finds support in neuroscience and offers reliable solutions to the problems of consciousness, mental causation, and the self.

No paradox exists in the fact that, in the Special Relativity, for the mass of a material body, considered in motion at constant speed, whose measure is u, the formula: m = m0/√ can be written, while for a photon the same formula holds, when between its source and the observer a state of relative motion at constant speed, whose measure is u, exists and it is observed along the direction perpendicular to the direction of his speed.

This paper proposes a critical analysis of that interpretation of the Nāgārjunian doctrine of the two truths as summarized—by both Mark Siderits and Jay L. Garfield—in the formula: “the ultimate truth is that there is no ultimate truth”. This ‘semantic reading’ of Nāgārjuna’s theory, despite its importance as a criticism of the ‘metaphysical interpretations’, would in itself be defective and improbable. Indeed, firstly, semantic interpretation presents a formal defect: it fails to clearly and explicitly express that which it contains logically; (...) the previously mentioned formula must necessarily be completed by: “the conventional truth is that nothing is conventional truth”. Secondly, after having recognized what Siderits’ and Garfield’s analyses contain implicitly, other logical and philological defects in their position emerge: the existence of the ‘conventional’ would appear—despite the efforts of semantic interpreters to demonstrate quite the contrary—definitively inconceivable without the presupposition of something ‘real’; moreover, the number of verses in Nāgārjuna that are in opposition to the semantic interpretation (even if we grant semantic interpreters that these verses do not justify a metaphysical reconstruction of Nagarjuna’s doctrine) would seem too great and significant to be ignored. (shrink)