The paper includes a series of letters exchanged between the author and the late Professor Feyerabend, concerning the best "method" for military intelligence, as a test case for the role of conceptual frameworks in philosophy of science. The letters deal with issues like: Is it possible to make an intelligence estimate without a conceptual framework? Does such a framework have any 'positive' role? If so, how should a conceptual framework in intelligence be built? What risks lurk within it? Is it (...) possible to indicate methods for intelligence estimates which are 'better' and more 'successful' than others? (shrink)

Paul Merkley draws on the published literature of the World Council of Churches, the Middle East Council of Churches, the Roman Catholic Church, and other Christian organizations that have an interest in the question of Israel's past, present, and future, and on interviews with numerous key figures within the government of Israel, spokesmen for the Palestine Authority, and leaders of all the major pro and anti-Zionist Christian organizations to demonstrate that Christian attitudes towards Israel remain remarkably (...) polarized. To most evangelical and fundamentalist Christians, loyalty to Israel is a kind of second patriotism, nurtured by the conviction that Israel's restoration is a part of God's plan for history. However mainstream Protestantism champions "Palestinian nationalism" and, drawing on the rhetoric of the Middle East Council of Churches, does not hesitate to portray Israel as an Aoppressor." Merkley concludes that Christian attitudes towards Israel reflect fundamental theological attitudes that must be studied against the long historical background of Christian attitudes towards Judaism and Islam. (shrink)

Japan's politieal, cultural, and geographic isolation, its symbiotic government-business arrangement, and its practice of practical, resources-oriented politics, trade, and diplomacy have led it to be the only major global economic power to strictIy comply with the Arab boycott. A brief history and description of the boycott are presented here, along with an overview of the responses of major economic trading nations. Three issues are addressed: Japan's global conscience, the framework appropriate to analyze the ethics of global economic boycotts, and the (...) Japanese government's excuse of leaving boycott decisions to business considering the historic relationship between the two. The logical conclusion of this analysis is that Japan as a nation must abandon its insularity and take a greater ethical responsibility in line with its economic power. From this comes the responsibility of the govenment to guide the business sector towards a corporate conscienee, one that is grounded in global awareness. (shrink)

This paper propounds a systematic examination of the link between the Knower Paradox and provability interpretations of modal logic. The aim of the paper is threefold: to give a streamlined presentation of the Knower Paradox and related results; to clarify the notion of a syntactical treatment of modalities; finally, to discuss the kind of solution that modal provability logic provides to the Paradox. I discuss the respective strength of different versions of the Knower Paradox, both in the framework of first-order (...) arithmetic and in that of modal logic with fixed point operators. It is shown that the notion of a syntactical treatment of modalities is ambiguous between a self-referential treatment and a metalinguistic treatment of modalities, and that these two notions are independent. I survey and compare the provability interpretations of modality respectively given by Skyrms, B. (1978, The Journal of Philosophy 75: 368–387) Anderson, C.A. (1983, The Journal of Philosophy 80: 338–355) and Solovay, R. (1976, Israel Journal of Mathematics 25: 287–304). I examine how these interpretations enable us to bypass the limitations imposed by the Knower Paradox while preserving the laws of classical logic, each time by appeal to a distinct form of hierarchy. (shrink)

There is long-standing disagreement about how radical Adam Smith should be taken to be. Recently, Jonathan Israel’s work on the enlightenment situates Smith as a moderate enlightenment thinker. This article challenges that assessment. Smith sees aristocrats as largely devoid of competence, wisdom, and virtue and thinks they do not wield significant political power in commercial societies. He is also highly critical of their economic power; and uses a neo-Roman concept of liberty to provide a powerful critique of slavery and (...) feudalism. In so doing, he extends discussions of liberty and focuses them on economic relations in ways that prefigure labour republicanism. Finally, I show how these more radical commitments can be reconciled with his moderate proposals for political reform through his epistemology and realist anti-utopianism. These are aspects of Smith’s thought that are essential for understanding it correctly and have much to teach us today. (shrink)

Zusanznzenfassung – Das Buch von Alexander Wittenberg, « Bildung and Mathematik », ist ein Beitrag zu der aktuellen Diskussion über die geeignete Gestaltung des mathematischen Unterrichts auf den Mittelschulen, an welcher sich Wittenberg schon vordem mit verschiedenen Publikationen beteiligte Das Buch war als erster Teil eines umfassenderen Werkes gedacht, dessen Vollendung ihm leider durch seinen frühzeitigen Tod versagt wurde. Wittenberg setzt sich vor allem dafür ein, dass der Mathematikunterricht wie überhaupt der Unterricht an der Mittelschule nicht vornehmlich als Vorbereitung auf (...) das spätere Studium, sondern im Hinblick auf die Geistesbildung and Persönlichkeitsbildung der Schüler gestaltet werde. Speziell bezüglich der Mathematik ist es seine Absicht, zu zeigen, dass dieses Fach für eine solche Gestaltung besondere Möglichkeiten bietet. Seine Ausführungen darüber bestehen in dreierlei: 1. in der generellen Hervorhebung der für einen allgemeinbildenden Unterricht relevanten Charaktere der Mathematik; 2. in generellen Vorschlägen für die Anlage des Unterrichts, insbesondere demjenigen der «Themenkreismethodea»; 3. in der ausführlichen Beschreibung eines im Sinne seiner Direktiven gestalteten Lehrganges der elementaren Geometrie. Die Gestaltung ist allenthalben ausgerichtet auf die Entfaltung geistiger Selbständigkeit and Produktivität. In diesem Anliegen weiss Wittenberg sich einig mit den Bestrebungen, wie sie von manchen Forschern unserer Zeit, wie M. Wagenschein, G. Pólya, M. Wertheimer, A. N. Whitehead, verfochten werden.Im vorstehenden Artikel werden die Hauptgedanken dieses in seinen Ausführungen sehr eindrücklichen and an lehrreichen Bemerkungen sehr reichhaltigen Buches dargelegt; insbesondere wird der erwähnte, als Beispiel dienende Lehrgang, mit einigen kommentierenden Bemerkungen, vorgeführt. (shrink)

Introduction Paul Boshears The following excerpt from Paul Amitai's In Between States: Field notes and speculations on postwar landscapes (2012) confounds its reader. Presenting an alternate history of the State of Israel as a space station orbiting Earth, the excitement of possibilities crackles across the texts and images. Like Chris Marker's La Jeteé , the accompanying static images distort the viewer's temporality: are these archaeological items, images from a past, or a future? Why isn't this our future? (...) In Between States can also be seen as complementing Larissa Sansour's provocative science fiction works, Space Exodus (2009) which "documents" the Palestinian space program, and her Nation Estate (2012), in which Palestine is relocated into a skyscraper. Amitai's vision opens onto an intergalactic diaspora, wherein the refugees of World War II are given the stars as Western Europe continues to fight over terrestial colonies. —PFB Auditorium, Hoechst AG headquarters, Industriepark-Höchst, 2011. In 1941 an investigation by the US Justice Department exposed a marriage cartel between John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil (now ExxonMobil) and I.G. Farben. The two corporations had formed a joint operation in 1927 called Standard IG Farben. It was revealed that the two had shared patents in order to control prices and markets in their respective regions. Standard was accused of hiding patents from the US Navy and supplying fuel to German submarines, which lead to charges of criminal conspiracy. The Pentagon intervened, requesting that President Roosevelt stop the investigation in order to protect war production and oil supply. Roosevelt agreed, and the Senate committee investigating the matter, headed by Senator Harry Truman, was halted. Standard Oil paid a fine of $5000 and promised to stop supplying fuel to the enemies. Auditorium, Hoechst AG headquarters, Industriepark-Höchst, 2011. Furious at the decision to terminate the investigation of acts he considered treason, Truman initiated a new inquiry into Standard Oil’s war-time practices after succeeding Roosevelt as president in 1945. With the chief executives of I.G Farben simultaneously on trial at Nuremburg, Truman brokered a deal with the Allies that reduced or withdrew criminal charges leveled against both corporations in exchange for Standard Oil and I.G. Farben’s sponsorship of one of Truman’s most ambitious postwar projects—the relocation of the Jewish people. Detail, Sanofi-Aventis advertisement, 2011. The third critical player in this bold experiment was the nascent North Atlantic Space Agency. Formed by Allied forces using the seized assets and engineering expertise of Hitler’s hitherto classified space program (conquer Earth, then the stars), the North Atlantic Space Agency was a pre-NATO foray into interstellar nation building, with orbital occupation as the first point of order. By 1947, NASA was nearly ready to deploy the first manned space station. Standard Oil and I.G. Farben’s advanced fuel refinement capacities and deep, war-enriched financial resources allowed NASA to speed up their launch schedule significantly. Detail, Sanofi-Aventis advertisement, 2011. Diplomatic efforts to establish a Jewish homeland in Palestine were failing to gain traction, while post-colonial England held its ground on immigration restrictions and bands of Jews and Arabs battled over territory on the ground. More immediate was the issue of temporarily housing Holocaust survivors and refugees across scorched Europe. Leaders of the continental nations demonstrated, at best, reluctance to accommodate the Jews, who in turn were, at the least, resistant to returning to the same bloody cocktail from which they had fled. Truman used the impasse to advance a plan for NASA’s space station to be put to use as a temporary Jewish outpost, an orbital displaced persons camp, to be operated by the US Army. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. Final preparations advanced rapidly. Viewing the orbital displaced persons (ODP) camp as a solution to their immigration problem both at home and abroad, England came on board as a willing partner. Spaceship Exodus was positioned for takeoff on German farmland 20 kilometers southwest of Frankfurt. On December 30, 1947, one month after the UN General Assembly voted down the separation plan for Palestine, Exodus rocketed into the atmosphere hauling the first module of barracks designed to house 1,500 refugees. Transport vehicles arrived shortly thereafter, loaded down with leftover wartime military rations and 3,000 Jews of Russian and Polish origin. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. "The camp is the space that is opened when the state of exception begins to become the rule."—Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer , trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 96. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. The ODP camp proved to be a longer-term solution than originally envisioned. Additional installations were positioned to form swollen clusters of interlocking units – sleeping quarters, schools, clinics, canteens. The UN was brought in to monitor the camp following two chaotic years of US Army control in which food shortages, pandemic diseases, and rampant black market trade had brought the camp to near total collapse. No less bureaucratic or ineffectual, the UN relief agency at least had prior experience facilitating contexts of a similar magnitude and could potentially predict outcomes. Detail, Infaserv Höchst advertisement, 2011. What had been unexpected was the degree to which the camp would evolve into its own self-regulated, hive-like ecosystem where previously accepted rules of conduct were not applicable. The ODP camp was an exceptional space, a riverboat casino, an offshore research lab of social experimentation and entrepreneurial innovation. No longer Earth-bound, touching soil knotted by prescripts of Talmudic law, the camp residents were able to rationalize loopholes and detonate barriers standing in the way of absolute production. The Jewish archipelago was renamed Israel after the ancient homeland. If the temple couldn’t be rebuilt in the motherland, a post-national rhizome would sprout up in its stead. Eyes everywhere, beyond all borders. More information on the project at the author's site. (shrink)

This paper argues that efforts to understand historically remote patterns of thought are driven away from their original meaning if the investigation focuses on reconstruction of concepts , instead of cognitive ‘complexes’. My paper draws on research by Jan Assmann, Jean-Jacques Glassner, Keimpe Algra, Alex Purves, Nicholas Wyatt, and others on the cultures of Ancient Greece, Israel, Egypt, Mesopotamia, and Etruria through comparative analyses of the semantic fields of spatial and temporal terms, and how these terms are shaped by (...) their relation to the sphere of the sacred. It shows that there are three super-ordinate timeframes - the cyclical, the linear and the static - each of which is composed of lower-order cycles (days, lunar months, and seasons). These timeframes reflect their cultures’ ideas about the nature, scope and power of the gods, and structure the common point-of-view about the present, the past and eternity. There are also super-ordinate spatial frames which reflect their cultures’ ideas about the heavens and which structure both the sacred precinct and the profane field of action and exchange. Close analysis of texts that use words such as eternity, forever, past, present, and future, for example, do not reveal that there is anything like a general abstract concept of time in virtue of which some thing or event can be said to be in time or to have its own time. Archaic patterns of thought do not differ from our “ modern ” patterns in having different concepts, but in not having anything like concepts at all. (shrink)

Although his ‘Jewish Problems’ article of 1943 would be his only publication on the subject, Michael Polanyi thought, wrote, and lectured about Zionism throughout the 1930s and 1940s. He framed the issues concerning Jewish settlement in Palestine not within the immediate context of the Second World War but within the wider context of assimilation and Jewish encounters with modernity. Specifically, Polanyi engaged the arguments of Lewis Namier, a Manchester colleague and committed Zionist. Polanyi approached Zionism from the perspective of a (...) ‘non-Jewish Jew’ who found common ground with some of the views expressed by Anglo-Zionism as weil as the ‘liberal critics’ of Zionism. The fact that he felt compelled to enter this debate speaks to his identity as a Jewish intellectual who regarded ‘assimilationists’ and their building of in-roads to the modern world as the moral equivalent of the pioneers who settled the Land of Israel and made possible further immigration. (shrink)

The new atheists (Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens) level arguments against Old Testament morality as primitive and barbaric, presumably undercutting belief in the biblical God (Yahweh). Yet the Old Testament presents creational moral ideals in Genesis 1–2. Because of Israel’s embeddedness in the ancient Near East’s harsh, morally-problematic social milieu, Old Testament legislation is in places still morally inferior, though offering dramatic, incremental improvements upon such conditions. Mosaic Law attempts to regulate and limit tolerated structures (warfare, polygamy, patriarchalism, slavery), permitting (...) various social structures because of human hardheartedness. Though falling short of the divine ideal, Mosaic laws often point to it. (shrink)

This short text provides an introduction to the five papers that follow, all of which reflect on R.S. Peters, his founding importance for contemporary philosophy of education, and his continuing relevance. It sets the scene by referring to Peters’ early and important encounter with Israel Scheffler before going on briefly to acknowledge other work published over the past decade that examines Peters’ achievement. In addition, it explains the background to the fifth paper in this suite. This is Ieuan Lloyd's (...) record, posthumously published, of conversations about the philosophy of education with Rush Rhees, in which Peters’ work is considered. (shrink)

S. Leyla Gürkan’s The Jews as a Chosen People: Tradition and Transformation is a bold attempt to trace the concept of the election of Israel from its Biblical and early Rabbinic development to the early modern and post-holocaust periods. Written as the history of an idea, the common thread tying the work together is the account and analysis of how this single, sometimes thorny, question of “chosenness” has animated Jewish conceptions of identity throughout its history. The author’s focus on (...) this idea serves as the motivation of the work to describe how “the idea of chosenness . . . is the raison d’être of the Jewish religion as well as the Jewish people” (p. 1). The author describes the question of .. (shrink)

Montesquieu's Considérations sur les causes de la grandeur des Romains et de leur décadence (1733/1734) is a methodological exercise in causal explanation on the meso-level applied to the subject of the military rise and fall of Rome. Rome is described as a system with contingent initial conditions that have a strong path-determining effect. Contingent and plastic initial configurations become highly determining in their subsequent operation, thanks to self-reinforcing feedback loops. Montesquieu's method seems influenced by the ruthless commitment to efficient causality (...) and the reductionism of seventeenth-century mechanicist philosophy; but in contrast to these predecessors, he is more interested in dynamic processes than in unchangeable substances, and his use of efficient causality in the context of a system approach implies a form of holism that is lacking in his predecessors. The formal and conceptual analysis in this article is in many ways complementary with Paul Rahe's recent predominantly political analysis of the Considérations. At the same time, this article points to a problem in the works on the Enlightenment by Jonathan Israel: his account stresses a one-dimensional continuum consisting of Radical, Moderate and Counter-Enlightenment. This invites Israel to place the combined religious, political and philosophical views of each thinker on one of these three points. His scheme runs into trouble when a thinker with moderate religious and political views produces radical philosophical concepts. Montesquieu's Considérations is a case in point. (shrink)

This creates a Christian theology of wisdom for the present day, in discussion with two sets of conversation-partners: The writers of the 'wisdom literature' in ancient Israel and the Jewish community in Alexandria; and the philosophers and thinkers of the late-modern age, among them Derrida, Levinas, Kristeva, Ricoeur, and Arendt.

In this volume, philosophers from Britain, Israel and the US bring these interpretive techniques together and present important accounts of the problem of ...

The present essay aims at defining the attitude of the French press towards the conflict of May/]une 1967 between Israel and Arab countries.As a thematic analysis of a representative sample of daily, weekly and monthly newspapers, covering bath periods of the preceding diplomatic antagonism and of the actual war, the article comprises a number of quantitative approaches which, as they complement each other, lead to certain conclusions in respect, on the one hand, of the particular newspaper analysed and, on (...) the other hand, of the complete sample under observation. This method makes it possible to bring to light the fundamental pro-Israel and anti-Arab leanings of the sample, as they reflect the pre-existent attitudes of French public opinion. It also reveals that the only pro-Arab and anti-Israel newspaper are those that belang at the far left end of the sample.These factors lead to hypothesize that the disposition which favoured Israel sprung in fact not from any special sympathy towards Jewry, but from a feeling of bond with a mode of civilisation as represented by the Western and pro-Western characteristics of Israel. (shrink)

Israel Scheffler's ground-breaking essay, On Human Potential, deserves to be more widely known among educational policy analysts, especially in light of the popularity in educationist circles of W.E. Deming's organizational philosophy known as Total Quality Management . In what follows,I argue that the heuristical value of Deming's perscriptions are entailed in Scheffler's On Human Potential. More importantly, I argue, where Deming's work falls short, especially in being naive about the human condition, Scheffler's analysis provides a foundation for management theory (...) in education that insures the flourishing of an optimal number of contributing participants. In fashioning these ideas, Scheffler brings pioneering thinking to the emerging fields of management studies generally and educational policy specifically. (shrink)

The concept of faith has remained inscrutable to thinkers for centuries. The late Nathan Rotenstreich believed that faith was such a difficult topic for so many because of its inextricable links to theology and religion. _On Faith_, Rotenstreich's last work which was edited and prepared for publication by Paul Mendes-Flohr, attempts to detach the concept from its religious underpinnings and consider it in its own right, as a human phenomenon and cognitive attitude. Faith, Rotenstreich contends, should not be confused (...) with its historical manifestations. By making faith a philosophical rather than a theological matter, he explores its essence as an awareness of how we relate within mundane reality to all that is beyond the human world. Arguing for the intentionality of faith, Rotenstreich shows how it structures a variety of relations that range from the experience of the holy to the nature of cults, traditional religion, and the idea of servitude to God. Rotenstreich's phenomenological study will be of great importance for religious scholars as well as for philosophers. Nathan Rotenstreich was professor of philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He was elected to the Israel Academy of Sciences and Humanities, and his works include _Jews and German Philosophy_ and _Reason and Its Manifestations: A Study of Kant and Hegel_. (shrink)

This paper continues Israel Scheffler's investigation of rituals as autographic/allographic. It concludes that the autographic/allographic distinction is more fruitfully applied to rituals as a gradual distinction, distinguishing rituals in terms of their autographic/allographic elements or aspects.

In this edited collection on Jewish and Arab childhood in Israel, contributors illuminate the experiences of the individual child with family and community, the formal education system, and informal leisure culture, and they explore representations of childhood and its perceptions in literature and culture.

Traditionally, the term ‘diaspora’ (from the Greek translation of the Hebrew Bible) referred to the dispersion of the Jewish people from ancient Israel. It had a pejorative connotation, associated...