Greenberg restructures the history of modern Jewish thought comprehensively, providing first-time English translations of Reggio, Krokhmal, Maimon, Samuel Hirsch, Formstecher, Steinheim, Ascher, Einhorn, Samuel David Luzzatto, and Hermann Cohen. The availability of these sources fills a gap in the field and stimulates new directions for teaching and scholarly research in modern Jewish thought.

In this book, Yael Greenberg discusses and clarifies a number of controversial issues and phenomena in the generic literature, including the existence of ...

This paper deals with the exceptions-tolerance property of generic sentences with indefinite singular and bare plural subjects (IS and BP generics, respectively) and with the way this property is connected to some well-known observations about felicity differences between the two types of generics (e.g. Lawler's 1973, Madrigals are popular vs. #A madrigal is popular). I show that whereas both IS and BP generics tolerate exceptional and contextually irrelevant individuals and situations in a strikingly similar way, which indicates the existence of (...) a basically equivalent tolerance mechanism, there is also a difference between them, unnoticed so far, which concerns the degree to which the properties of the legitimate exceptions can be characterized in advance. Following claims in Greenberg (2003), I argue that both this newly observed difference as well as the traditional felicity differences result from an underlying contrast in the type of ‘non-accidentalness’ expressed by the two types of generic sentences, and more formally, in the accessibility relations that their generic quantifier (Gen) is compatible with. To capture the new difference in tolerance of exceptions, I develop an improved version of the exceptions-tolerance mechanism for generic sentences suggested in Kadmon & Landman (1993), namely, a restriction on the set of individuals and situations quantified by Gen, which is partially vague to two different degrees using supervaluationist methods. The different degrees of vagueness in this restriction are shown to be systematically dependent on the two types of accessibility relations that IS and BP generics are compatible with, which are redefined as precise and vague restrictions on the generic quantification over worlds. (shrink)

The cinematic Other is interpreted as an unconscious personality, a denied part of the protagonist that appears in his life as a shadowy menace who won't go away. Overall the book aims to show how movies envision the unconscious Other we all too often project on other people.

The cinematic Other is interpreted as an unconscious personality, a denied part of the protagonist that appears in his life as a shadowy menace who won't go away. Overall the book aims to show how movies envision the unconscious Other we all too often project on other people.

Thanks to his unsurpassed eye and his fearless willingness to take a stand, Clement Greenberg (1909 1994) became one of the giants of 20th century art criticism a writer who set the terms of critical discourse from the moment he burst onto the scene with his seminal essays Avant Garde and Kitsch (1939) and Towards a Newer Laocoon (1940). In this work, which gathers previously uncollected essays and a series of seminars delivered at Bennington in 1971, Greenberg provides (...) his most expansive statement of his views on taste and quality in art, arguing for an esthetic that flies in the face of current art world fashions. Greenberg insists despite the attempts from Marcel Duchamp onwards to escape the jurisdiction of taste by producing an art so disjunctive that it cannot be judged that taste is inexorable. He argues that standards of quality in art, the artist's responsibility to seek out the hardest demands of a medium, and the critic's responsibility to discriminate, are essential conditions for great art. The obsession with innovation the epidemic of newness leads, in Greenbergs view, to the boringness of so much avant garde art. He discusses the interplay of expectation and surprise in aesthetic experience, and the exalted consciousness produced by great art. Homemade Esthetics allows us particularly in the transcribed seminar sessions, never before published to watch the critics mind at work, defending (and at times reconsidering) his theories. His views, often controversial, are the record of a lifetime of looking at and thinking about art as intensely as anyone ever has. (shrink)

When attempting to generalize recursion theory to admissible ordinals, it may seem as if all classical priority constructions can be lifted to any admissible ordinal satisfying a sufficiently strong fragment of the replacement scheme. We show, however, that this is not always the case. In fact, there are some constructions which make an essential use of the notion of finiteness which cannot be replaced by the generalized notion of $\alpha$-finiteness. As examples we discuss bothcodings of models of arithmetic into the (...) recursively enumerable degrees, and non-distributive lattice embeddings into these degrees. We show that if an admissible ordinal $\alpha$ is effectively close to $\omega$ (where this closeness can be measured by size or by cofinality) then such constructions maybe performed in the $\alpha$-r.e. degrees, but otherwise they fail. The results of these constructions can be expressed in the first-order language of partially ordered sets, and so these results also show that there are natu. (shrink)

This paper examines the interplay of semantics and pragmatics within the domain of film. Films are made up of individual shots strung together in sequences over time. Though each shot is disconnected from the next, combinations of shots still convey coherent stories that take place in continuous space and time. How is this possible? The semantic view of film holds that film coherence is achieved in part through a kind of film language, a set of conventions which govern the relationships (...) between shots. In this paper, we develop and defend a new version of the semantic view. We articulate it for a pair of conventions that govern spatial relations between viewpoints. One such rule is already well-known; sometimes called the "180° Rule," we term it the X-Constraint; to this we add a previously unrecorded rule, the T-Constraint. As we show, both have the effect, in different ways, of limiting the way that viewpoint can shift through space from shot to shot over the course of a film sequence. Such constraints, we contend, are analogous to relations of discourse coherence that are widely recognized in the linguistic domain. If film is to have a language, it is a language made up of rules like these. (shrink)

In a circulated but heretofore unpublished 2001 paper, I argued that Leiter's analogy to Quine's 'naturalization of epistemology' does not do the philosophical work Leiter suggests. I revisit the issues in this new essay. I first show that Leiter's replies to my arguments fail. Most significantly, if — contrary to the genuinely naturalistic reading of Quine that I advanced — Quine is understood as claiming that we have no vantage point from which to address whether belief in scientific theories is (...) ever justified, it would not help Leiter's parallel. Given Leiter's way of drawing the parallel, the analogous position in the legal case would be not the Legal Realists' indeterminacy thesis, but the very different position that we have no vantage point from which to address whether legal decisions can ever be justified. I then go on to address the more important question of whether the indeterminacy thesis, if true, would support any replacement of important legal philosophical questions with empirical ones. Although Ronald Dworkin has argued against the indeterminacy thesis, if he were wrong on this issue, it would not in any way suggest that the questions with which Dworkin is centrally concerned cannot fruitfully be addressed. The indeterminacy thesis is a bone of contention in an ordinary philosophical debate between its proponents and Dworkin. Of course, if the determinacy thesis were true, no one should try to show that it is false, but this triviality lends no support to the kind of replacement proposal that Leiter proposes. I conclude with some general reflections on naturalism and philosophical methodology. (shrink)

On May 16, 2012, RAND brought together a group of public company directors and executives, chief ethics and compliance officers, and stakeholders from the government, academic, and nonprofit sectors for a series of conversations about organizational culture, as well as to explore the business and policy ramifications of efforts to build better ethical cultures in corporations.

Sean Greenberg - Descartes and the Passionate Mind - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:3 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.3 499-500 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Sean Greenberg University of California Irvine Deborah J. Brown. Descartes and the Passionate Mind. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006. Pp. xi + 231. Cloth, $85.00. In the past two decades, Descartes's last work, The Passions of the Soul, has received considerable attention from Descartes scholars. In (...) the first English-language monograph on the Passions, Deborah Brown mounts a case for the work's philosophical significance. Brown takes Descartes's treatment of the passions to extend the discussion of the.. (shrink)

Bernard Harcourt, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishing in an Actuarial Age Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006, 336pp.

This paper deals with the role of Judaism in Walter Benjamin's famous 1921 essay on violence and law, Zur Kritik der Gewalt. Despite the intense attention devoted to this essay, the role of Jewish myth in it has not yet been thoroughly explained. This study contends that the association between what Benjamin termed revolutionary violence and the Jewish messianic tradition, which plays a central role in the evaluation of Benjamin's text, is far more problematic than has hitherto been assumed, and (...) poses a serious challenge, which has not been fully examined in its historical context. Second, this essay claims that the subversive elements that many have supposedly found in Benjamin's text and the attempts to link these elements to messianic traditions are also unconvincing. Third, the paper contextualizes Benjamin's thought within the framework of the Jewish political–theological debate of the period. It contends that Benjamin's theory of law and justice should be understood not as a revolutionary, anti-republican text, as has been generally accepted, but as a secularized conservative orthodox one. In doing so, it seeks to shed light not only on Benjamin's early thinking and its influences, but also on the neglected element of Jewish orthodoxy within the broader topic of political theology. (shrink)

Gorgeous black and white photographs of machines built to unlock the secrets of the universe.

We define the Scott complexity of a countable structure to be the least complexity of a Scott sentence for that structure. This is a finer notion of complexity than Scott rank: it distinguishes between whether the simplest Scott sentence is $\Sigma _{\alpha }$, $\Pi _{\alpha }$, or $\mathrm {d-}\Sigma _{\alpha }$. We give a complete classification of the possible Scott complexities, including an example of a structure whose simplest Scott sentence is $\Sigma _{\lambda + 1}$ for $\lambda $ a limit (...) ordinal. This answers a question left open by A. Miller.We also construct examples of computable structures of high Scott rank with Scott complexities $\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$ and $\mathrm {d-}\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$. There are three other possible Scott complexities for a computable structure of high Scott rank: $\Pi _{\omega _1^{CK}}$, $\Pi _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$, $\Sigma _{\omega _1^{CK}+1}$. Examples of these were already known. Our examples are computable structures of Scott rank $\omega _1^{CK}+1$ which, after naming finitely many constants, have Scott rank $\omega _1^{CK}$. The existence of such structures was an open question. (shrink)

A critical examination of the philosophical theories of Fritz Mauthner. Mauthner was a prolific writer with diverse intellectual interests, but he was preoccupied with developing a comprehensive philosophy or 'critique' of language which would help resolve a whole range of persistent and controversial philosophical problems. In pursuit of this aim Mauthner pioneered a view of language which has had a very wide circulation in the twentieth century - namely that the analysis and understanding of language, particularly ordinary language, is the (...) philosophers most important task. Mauthner was very much an outsider from the German academic establishment and has little sympathy with the increasingly influential phenomenology of the time. In this thorough and authoritative study, Gershon Weiler locates his ideas in their proper historical tradition and urges that their originality now be recognised and their interest reconsidered. (shrink)

In a philosophical paper the point one wishes to make should be stated at the very outset. And in dealing with a problem which is as controversial as religion, the bias should be confessed before any points are made. I want to conform at once to both these requirements. I want to discuss beliefs, ordinary beliefs but mainly religious ones, for the expression of which, oddly enough, we use the same word. “Belief” and “Faith” are admittedly different in English, but (...) many languages possess only one word for these and further I shall try to show that even in English the difference is not very great and that they have, if not the same, at least a very similar logical grammar. The point of my argument is that beliefs can be discussed rationally and that they should be so discussed. Religious arguments have been going on for a very long time, and I find it incredible that people of immense intellectual qualities, who devoted their time and energy to these discussions, have been working under a simple delusion, not understanding the very nature of the thing they were doing. (shrink)

Professor J. W. N. Watkins argues in his Hobbes' System of Ideas that Hobbes' theory of moral predicates must be interpreted in terms of Austinian performatives. In this paper I shall argue two points. First, that Watkins' thesis is false. Second, that Hobbes' own doctrine, which asserts that things are made good or just by being declared to be so by the sovereign, is inconsistent. Watkins begins with brief exposition of Hobbes' theory of moral language as stated in the Leviathan (...) . But whatsoever is the object of any mans Appetite or Desire; that is if, which he for his part calleth Good : And the object of his Hate, and Aversion, Evill ; And of his Contempt, Vile and Inconsiderable . For these words of Good, Evill, and Contemptible, are ever used with relation to the person that useth them: There being nothing simply and absolutely so; nor any common Rule of Good and Evill, to be taken from the nature of the objects themselves; but from the Person of the man or, from the Person that representeth it; or from an Arbitrator or Judge, whom men disagreeing shall by consent set up, and make his sentence the Rule thereof. (shrink)

Quality health care relies upon communication in a patient's preferred language. Language access in health care occurs when individuals are: Welcomed by providers regardless of language ability; and Offered quality language services as part of their care. Federal law generally requires access to health care and quality language services for deaf and Limited English Proficient patients in health care settings, but these patients still find it hard to access health care and quality language services.Meanwhile, several states are implementing Medicaid Accountable (...) Care Organization initiatives to reduce health care costs and improve health care quality. Alternative payment methods used in these initiatives can give Accountable Care Organizations more flexibility to design linguistically accessible care, but they can also put ACOs at increased financial risk for the cost of care. If these new payment methods do not account for differences in patient language needs, ACO initiatives could have the unintended consequence of rewarding ACOs who do not reach out to deaf and LEP communities or offer quality language services.We reviewed public documents related to Medicaid ACO initiatives in six states. Some of these documents address language access. More could be done, however, to pay for language access efforts. This article describes Medicaid ACO initiatives and explores how different payment tools could be leveraged to reward ACOs for increased access to care and quality language services. We find that a combination of payment tools might be helpful to encourage both access and quality. (shrink)