In Generation Existential, Ethan Kleinberg shifts the focus to the initial reception of Heidegger's philosophy in France by those who first encountered it.

The philosophy of “presence” seeks to challenge current understandings of meaning and understanding. One can trace its origins back to Vico, Dilthey, and Heidegger, though its more immediate exponents include Jean-Luc Nancy, Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht, and such contemporary philosophers of history as Frank Ankersmit and Eelco Runia. The theoretical paradigm of presence conveys how the past is literally with us in the present in significant and material ways: Things we cannot touch nonetheless touch us. This makes presence a post-linguistic or (...) post-discursive theory that challenges current understandings of “meaning” and “interpretation.” Presence provides an overview of the concept and surveys both its weaknesses and its possible uses. In this book, Ethan Kleinberg and Ranjan Ghosh bring together an interdisciplinary group of contributors to explore the possibilities and limitations of presence from a variety of perspectives—history, sociology, literature, cultural theory, media studies, photography, memory, and political theory. The book features critical engagements with the presence paradigm within intellectual history, literary criticism, and the philosophy of history. In three original case studies, presence illuminates the relationships among photography, the past, memory, and the Other. What these diverse but overlapping essays have in common is a shared commitment to investigate the attempt to reconnect meaning with something “real” and to push the paradigm of presence beyond its current uses. The volume is thus an important intervention in the most fundamental debates within the humanities today. Contributors: Bill Ashcroft, University of New South Wales; Mark Bevir, University of California, Berkeley; Susan A. Crane, University of Arizona; Ranjan Ghosh, University of North Bengal; Suman Gupta, Open University Ethan Kleinberg, Wesleyan University; John Michael, University of Rochester; Vincent P. Pecora, University of Utah; Roger I. Simon. (shrink)

In this rich intellectual history of the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's Talmudic lectures in Paris, Ethan Kleinberg addresses Levinas's Jewish life and its relation to his philosophical writings while making an argument for the role and importance of Levinas's Talmudic lessons. Pairing each chapter with a related Talmudic lecture, Kleinberg uses the distinction Levinas presents between "God on Our Side" and "God on God's Side" to provide two discrete and at times conflicting approaches to Levinas's Talmudic readings. (...) One is historically situated and argued from "our side" while the other uses Levinas's Talmudic readings themselves to approach the issues as timeless and derived from "God on God's own side." Bringing the two approaches together, Kleinberg asks whether the ethical message and moral urgency of Levinas's Talmudic lectures can be extended beyond the texts and beliefs of a chosen people, religion, or even the seemingly primary unit of the self. Touching on Western philosophy, French Enlightenment universalism, and the Lithuanian Talmudic tradition, Kleinberg provides readers with a boundary-pushing investigation into the origins, influences, and causes of Levinas's turn to and use of Talmud. (shrink)

Haunting history -- Presence in absentia -- Chladenius, Droysen, Dilthey : back to where we've never been -- The analog ceiling -- The past that is.

This paper will address the topic of “tradition” by exploring the ways that Martin Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas, and Jacques Derrida each looked to return to traditional texts in order to overcome a perceived crisis or delimiting fault in the contemporary thought of their respective presents. For Heidegger, this meant a return to the pre-Socratics of “early Greek thinking.” For Levinas, it entailed a return to the sacred Jewish texts of the Talmud. For Derrida, it was the return to texts that (...) embodied the “Western metaphysical tradition,” be it by Plato, Descartes, Rousseau, or Marx. I then want to ask whether these reflections can be turned so as to shed light on three resilient trends in the practice of history that I will label positivist, speculative or teleological, and constructivist. By correlating the ways that Heidegger, Levinas, and Derrida utilize and employ “tradition” with the historical trends of positivism, speculative/teleological history, and constructivism, I hope to produce an engagement between theorists whose concerns implicate history even though they may not be explicitly historical, and historians who may not realize the ways that their work coincides with the claims of these theorists. (shrink)

Abstract In this article, I attempt to trace Emmanuel Levinas's notion of transcendence and its relation to infinity to his Talmudic lectures to offer both a philosophical diagnosis as well as a counter to the essentialist logic of what Levinas considers the traditional or ?metaphysical? concept of time. This opens my speculative argument up to two levels of interpretation as it requires an historical investigation into the cultural context that conditioned Levinas's particular understanding of transcendence and infinity in relation to (...) his turn toward Talmud and sacred Jewish texts in the years following World War Two. But it also requires that we take seriously the critique of history as inadequate to such a task that is inherent in Levinas's presentation of these concepts. All of this hinges on the role and place of ?time? in Levinas. I consider Levinas's category of ?time immemorial? as a counter to the essentialist logic of what Levinas considers the traditional or ?metaphysical? concept of time which I claim is at the core of the ?realist? attitude toward the practice of history founded upon the categories of agency, experience, memory, testimony, and most recently the importance of ?presence?. This in turn leads me to propose two possible alternatives, through Freud and Derrida, that conserve Levinas's critique of the essentialist understanding of time uncoupled from any transcendent or theological mechanism. (shrink)

Motivated by a desire to narrate and contextualize the deluge of "French theory," After the Deluege showcases recent work by today's brightest scholars of French intellectual history that historicizes key debates, figures, and turning points in the postwar era of French thought.

According to the displacement model of secularization, religious-theological concepts, themes, and values have been reinterpreted in non-religious contexts without fully dispensing with the religious content. Secularization is thus incomplete. The incomplete secularization argument can be used as a lens through which to read Ethan Kleinberg’s deconstructive approach to the past. In his narrative, as reconstructed here, deconstruction promises to bring us closer to a secular relationship to the past than the ontological realism Kleinberg says still dominates contemporary (...) historical theory. By contrasting Kleinberg’s analysis with Hayden White’s, whose oeuvre can be read as structured by the idea of incomplete secularization and a wish to liberate history from religious themes in order to enable a direct confrontation with meaninglessness, I argue that Kleinberg’s deconstructive approach does not fulfill its promise. Rather, it opens up a post-secular historiography in which religious themes might find a place at the very heart of historical reasoning. (shrink)

The subtitle of Kleinberg’s Haunting History proposes a ‘deconstructive approach’ to Derrida and history. This review essay poses two questions which seek to establish what this could be. First, wh...

Between 1945 and 1953, while the Soviet Union confronted postwar reconstruction and Cold War crises, its unchallenged leader Joseph Stalin carved out time to study scientific disputes and dictate academic solutions. He spearheaded a discussion of "scientific" Marxist-Leninist philosophy, edited reports on genetics and physiology, adjudicated controversies about modern physics, and wrote essays on linguistics and political economy. Historians have been tempted to dismiss all this as the megalomaniacal ravings of a dying dictator. But in Stalin and the Soviet Science (...) Wars, Ethan Pollock draws on thousands of previously unexplored archival documents to demonstrate that Stalin was in fact determined to show how scientific truth and Party doctrine reinforced one another. Socialism was supposed to be scientific, and science ideologically correct, and Stalin ostensibly embodied the perfect symbiosis between power and knowledge. Focusing on six major postwar debates in the Soviet scientific community, this elegantly written book shows that Stalin's forays into scholarship can be understood only within the context of international tensions, institutional conflicts, and the growing uncertainty about the proper relationship between scientific knowledge and Party-dictated truths. The nature of Stalin's interventions makes clear that more was at stake than high politics: these science wars were about asserting that the Party was rational and modern, and about codifying the Soviet worldview in a battle for the hearts and minds of people around the globe during the early Cold War. Ultimately, however, the effort to develop a scientific basis for Soviet ideology undermined the system's legitimacy. (shrink)

Much has been written on whether practical knowledge (knowledge-how) reduces to propositional knowledge (knowledge-that). Less attention has been paid to what we call deliberative knowledge (knowledge-to), i.e., knowledge ascriptions embedding other infinitival questions, like _where to meet_, _when to leave_, and _what to bring_. We offer an analysis of knowledge-to and argue on its basis that, regardless of whether knowledge-how reduces to knowledge-that, no such reduction of knowledge-to is forthcoming. Knowledge-to, unlike knowledge-that and knowledge-how, requires the agent to have formed (...) certain conditional intentions. We discuss the philosophical implications for knowledge-how, deliberative questions, and virtue. (shrink)

The education of students and professionals in business ethics is an increasingly important goal on the agenda of business schools and corporations. The present study provides a meta-analysis of 25 previously conducted business ethics instructional programs. The role of criteria, study design, participant characteristics, quality of instruction, instructional content, instructional program characteristics, and characteristics of instructional methods as moderators of the effectiveness of business ethics instruction were examined. Overall, results indicate that business ethics instructional programs have a minimal␣impact on increasing (...) outcomes related to ethical perceptions, behavior, or awareness. However, specific criteria, content, and methodological moderators of effectiveness shed light on potential recommendations for␣improving business ethics instruction. Implications for␣future research and practice in business ethics are discussed. (shrink)

This paper contributes to the mathematical foundations of the model for utility theory developed by Richard Jeffrey in The Logic of Decision [5]. In it I discuss the relationship of Jeffrey's to classical models, state and interpret an existence theorem for numerical utilities and subjective probabilities and restate a theorem on their uniqueness.

In the last two decades, there has been a blossoming literature aiming to counter the neglect of plant capacities. In their recent paper, Miguel Segundo-Ortin and Paco Calvo begin by providing an overview of the literature to then question the mistaken assumptions that led to plants being immediately rejected as candidates for sentience. However, it appears that many responses to their arguments are based on the implicit conviction that because animals have far more sophisticated cognition and agency than plants, and (...) that plants should not have the same moral status as animals, plants should not have any moral status. Put in simpler terms: it is not as bad to eat plants than to eat, say, pigs. While there are still uncertainties around comparative moral and policy implications between animals and plants, given a gradualist account of quasi-sentience and partial moral status, both of which we claim are a matter of degree, we may not have to abolish our convictions by declaring that plants have no sentience or moral status at all. Indeed, we can hold two things at the same time: that animals and plants have moral status, but animals have prima facie more moral status than plants. (shrink)

This book comprises a series of studies devoted to an analytic examination of reasoning in the field of conduct. The first is analysis of the idea of justice undertaken in a spirit of positivism; the series continues in a different vein necessitated by compelling obligation the author found himself under to work out a logic of value judgments. This logic is in fact the Rhetoric and Topics of antiquity: the author's "Traité de l' Argumentation gave this new life, and the (...) present work demonstrates its philosophical importance. (shrink)

Although much technical and philosophical attention has been given to relevance logics, the notion of relevance itself is generally left at an intuitive level. It is difficult to find in the literature an explicit account of relevance in formal reasoning. In this article I offer a formal explication of the notion of relevance in deductive logic and argue that this notion has an interesting place in the study of classical logic. The main idea is that a premise is relevant to (...) an argument when it contributes to the validity of that argument. I then argue that the sequents which best embody this ideal of relevance are the so-called perfect sequents—that is, sequents which are valid but have no proper subsequents that are valid. Church’s theorem entails that there is no recursively axiomatizable proof-system that proves all and only the perfect sequents, so the project that emerges from studying perfection in classical logic is not one of finding a perfect subsystem of classical logic, but is rather a comparative study of classifying subsystems of classical logic according to how well they approximate the ideal of perfection. (shrink)

I present unexplored and unaccounted for uses of 'wants'. I call them advisory uses, on which information inaccessible to the desirer herself helps determine what she wants. I show that extant theories by Stalnaker, Heim, and Levinson fail to predict these uses. They also fail to predict true indicative conditionals with 'wants' in the consequent. These problems are related: intuitively valid reasoning with modus ponens on the basis of the conditionals in question results in unembedded advisory uses. I consider two (...) fixes, and end up endorsing a relativist semantics, according to which desire attributions express information-neutral propositions. On this view, 'wants' functions as a precisification of 'ought', which exhibits similar unembedded and compositional behavior. I conclude by sketching a pragmatic account of the purpose of desire attributions that explains why it made sense for them to evolve in this way. (shrink)

This book discusses the justifications and limits of cultural nationalism from a liberal perspective. Chaim Gans presents a normative typology of nationalist ideologies, distinguishing between cultural liberal nationalism and statist liberal nationalism. Statist nationalisms argue that states have an interest in the cultural homogeneity of their citizenries. Cultural nationalisms argue that people have interests in adhering to their cultures and in sustaining these cultures for generations. Gans argues that freedom- and identity-based justifications for cultural nationalism common in literature can (...) only support the adherence thesis, while the historical thesis could only be justified by the interest people have in the long-term endurance of their personal and group endeavors. The Limits of Nationalism examines demands often made in the name of cultural nationalism, such as claims for national self-determination, historical rights claims to territories and demands entailed by cultural particularism as opposed to cultural cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

We read with great interest Garland, Morain and Sugarman’s manuscript on the obligations of clinicians to participate in pragmatic clinical trials (PCTs) (Garland, Morain and Sugarman 2023). We bel...

A lively exploration of contemporary Buddhism from one of its most admired teachers. Do you feel at home right now? Or do you sense a hovering anxiety or uncertainty, an underlying unease that makes you feel just a bit uncomfortable, a bit distracted and disconnected from those around you? In The Road Home, Ethan Nichtern, a senior teacher in the Shambhala Buddhist tradition, investigates the journey each of us takes to find where we belong. Drawing from contemporary research on (...) meditation and mindfulness and his experience as a Buddhist teacher and practitioner, Nichtern describes in fresh and deeply resonant terms the basic existential experience that gives rise to spiritual seeking--and also to its potentially dangerous counterpart, spiritual materialism. He reveals how our individual quests for self-awareness ripple forward into relationships, communities, and society at large. And he explains exactly how, by turning our awareness to what's happening around us and inside us, we become able to enhance our sense of connection with others and, at the same time, change for the better our individual and collective patterns of greed, apathy, and inattention. In this wise and witty invitation to Buddhist meditation, Nichtern shows how, in order to create a truly compassionate and enlightened society, we must start with ourselves. And this means beginning by working with our own minds--in whatever state we find them in. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is a philosophical method that aims to design and spread conceptual and linguistic devices to cause meaningful changes in the world. So far, however, conceptual engineers have struggled to successfully spread the conceptual and linguistic entities they have designed to their target communities. This paper argues that conceptual engineering is far more likely to succeed if it incorporates empirical data and empirical methods. Because the causal factors influencing successful propagation of linguistic or conceptual devices are as complicated and (...) interwoven as they are, proper empirical research will greatly boost the likelihood that propagation is successful. In arguing for the superiority of empirical conceptual engineering over armchair-based conceptual engineering, this paper proposes a framework for understanding the causal forces at play in propagation. This is a three-part framework between the label of a lexical item, the psychological states associated with the lexical item, and the worldly things associated with the lexical item. By understanding the way causal forces affecting propagation play out at these three levels, conceptual engineers can better conceptualize, study, and harness the different causal forces affecting the success of their conceptual engineering projects. (shrink)

Conceptual engineering is the practice of revising concepts to improve how people talk and think. Its ability to improve talk and thought ultimately hinges on the successful dissemination of desired conceptual changes. Unfortunately, the field has been slow to develop methods to directly test what barriers stand in the way of propagation and what methods will most effectively propagate desired conceptual change. In order to test such questions, this paper introduces the masked time-lagged method. The masked time-lagged method tests people's (...) conceptual understanding at two different points in time without their knowledge of being tested, allowing us to measure conceptual revision in action. Using a masked time-lagged design on a content internalist framework, we attempted to revise PLANET and DINOSAUR in online participants to match experts' concepts. We successfully revised PLANET but not DINOSAUR, demonstrating some of the difficulties conceptual engineers face. Nonetheless, this paper provides conceptual engineers, regardless of framework, with the tools to tackle questions related to implementation empirically and head-on. (shrink)

Which function is computed by a Turing machine will depend on how the symbols it manipulates are interpreted. Further, by invoking bizarre systems of notation it is easy to define Turing machines that compute textbook examples of uncomputable functions, such as the solution to the decision problem for first-order logic. Thus, the distinction between computable and uncomputable functions depends on the system of notation used. This raises the question: which systems of notation are the relevant ones for determining whether a (...) function is computable? These are the acceptable notations. I argue for a use criterion of acceptability: the acceptable notations for a domain of objects D\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {D}}$$\end{document} are the notations that we can use for the usual D\documentclass[12pt]{minimal} \usepackage{amsmath} \usepackage{wasysym} \usepackage{amsfonts} \usepackage{amssymb} \usepackage{amsbsy} \usepackage{mathrsfs} \usepackage{upgreek} \setlength{\oddsidemargin}{-69pt} \begin{document}$${\mathcal {D}}$$\end{document}-activities. Acceptable notations for natural numbers are ones that we can count with. Acceptable notations for logical formulas are the ones that we can use in inference and logical analysis. And so on. This criterion makes computability a relative notion—whether a function is computable depends on which notations are acceptable, which is relative to our interests and abilities. I argue that this is not a problem, however, since there is independent reason for taking the extension of computable function to be relative to contingent facts. Similarly, the fact that the use criterion makes a mathematical distinction depend on practical concerns is also not a problem because it dovetails with similar phenomena in other areas of computability theory, namely the roles of notation in computation over real numbers and of Extended Church’s Thesis in complexity theory. (shrink)

Al-Fārābī's lost commentary on Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea is without doubt one of the most sorely missed lost works of the Islamic falāsifa. In part, this is because the commentary was in some respects a scandal, and scholars accordingly believe it may hold the key to resolving present-day disagreements on how to interpret al-Fārābī's views as expressed in his independent treatises. Perhaps al-Fārābī's most shocking or scandalous statement is that preserved by the Hispano-Muslim philosophers Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl, and Ibn Rushd. (...) According to them al-Fārābī says in his commentary on Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea that happiness is to be achieved only in this life, not in the afterlife; that there is no happiness but political happiness; and that union with the active intellect – generally considered the highest goal of human existence by the philosophers – is impossible. This paper addresses the following questions: What exactly is the debate about? Why is the question of immortality or conjunction related to Aristotle's Ethica Nicomachea? And why was it so controversial to say, in the context of the Ethica Nicomachea, that there is no happiness but political happiness? Although the bulk of al-Fārābī's commentary is still lost, I have discovered two quotations of it in Hebrew manuscripts. As I will argue in this paper, these newly-discovered quotations – which are included with an English translation in the appendix – can shed light on the mysteries concerning al-Fārābī's commentary. Résumé Le commentaire perdu d'al-Fārābī à l’ Ethique à Nicomaque d'Aristote est sans conteste, parmi les ouvrages perdus de philosophes islamiques, l'un de ceux dont on regrette le plus l'absence. Cela s'explique notamment par le caractère à certains égards scandaleux de ce commentaire, dont les spécialistes attendent dès lors qu'il recèle la clé pour résoudre les désaccords actuels quant à l'interprétation à donner aux idées formulées par cet auteur dans ses traités personnels. La thèse peut-être la plus choquante ou scandaleuse d'al-Fārābī est celle qui est préservée par les philosophes hispano-islamiques Ibn Bājja, Ibn Ṭufayl et Ibn Rushd: selon eux, il affirme, dans son commentaire à l’ Ethique à Nicomaque, que le bonheur ne saurait se réaliser qu'en cette vie et non dans l'au-delà, qu'il n'y a pas de bonheur autre que le bonheur politique, et que l'union à l'intellect agent – généralement tenue par les philosophes pour être la fin suprême de l'existence humaine – est impossible. Cet article traite les questions suivantes: quel est exactement l'enjeu de ce débat? Pourquoi les questions de l'immortalité et de la conjonction sont-elles liées à l’ Ethique à Nicomaque? Et en quoi était-il si problématique d'affirmer, en référence à cette œuvre, qu'il n'y a pas de bonheur autre que le bonheur politique? Même si le corps du commentaire d'al-Fārābī est encore perdu, j'en ai découvert deux citations dans des manuscrits hébreux. Comme je le soutiens ici, ces citations récemment découvertes – données dans l'appendice avec leur traduction anglaise – font un peu de lumière sur les mystères du commentaire d'al-Fārābī. (shrink)

The legitimacy of the Zionist project--establishing a Jewish homeland in Palestine--has been questioned since its inception. In recent years, the voices challenging the legitimacy of the State of Israel have become even louder. Chaim Gans examines these doubts and presents an in-depth, evenhanded philosophical analysis of the justice of Zionism.

The beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic offers a unique case study for understanding conceptual and linguistic propagation. In early 2020, scientists, politicians, journalists, and other public figures had to, with great urgency, propagate several public health-related concepts and terms to every person they could. This paper examines the propagation of coronavirus and social distancing and develops a framework for understanding how the language used to express a notion can help or hinder propagation. I argue that anyone designing a representational device (...) for propagation needs to appreciate the three-way causal relationship between language, people’s mental representations, and the extramental world. Using this framework, I explore what makes “social distancing” a bad name for social distancing and why it is unproblematic that “coronavirus” is a scientifically loose way of speaking about the virus. Through this and further study of the many historical examples of linguistic and conceptual propagation, conceptual engineers can better understand the complex challenges facing people who want to propagate representational devices. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that the ‘social meanings’ associated with sociolinguistic variation put pressure on the standard philosophical conception of language, according to which the foremost thing we do with words is exchange information. Drawing on parallels with the explanatory challenge posed by slurs and pejoratives, I argue that the best way to understand social meanings is to think of them in speech act theoretic terms. I develop a distinctive form of pluralism about the performances realized by means of (...) sociolinguistic variants, and I claim that engagement with such performances is an utterly pervasive feature of our linguistic activity. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have offered compelling reasons to think that demonstratives are best represented as variables, sensitive not to the context of utterance, but to a variable assignment. Variablists typically explain familiar intuitions about demonstratives—intuitions that suggest that what is said by way of a demonstrative sentence varies systematically over contexts—by claiming that contexts initialize a particular assignment of values to variables. I argue that we do not need to link context and the assignment parameter in this way, and that we (...) would do better not to. (shrink)

The New Rhetoric is founded on the idea that since “argumentation aims at securing the adherence of those to whom it is addressed, it is, in its entirety, relative to the audience to be influenced,” says Chaïm Perelman and L. Olbrechts-Tyteca, and they rely, in particular, for their theory of argumentation on the twin concepts of universal and particular audiences: while every argument is directed to a specific individual or group, the orator decides what information and what approaches will achieve (...) the greatest adherence according to an ideal audience. This ideal, Perelman explains, can be embodied, for example, "in God, in all reasonable and competent men, in the man deliberating or in an elite.” Like particular audiences, then, the universal audience is never fixed or absolute but depends on the orator, the content and goals of the argument, and the particular audience to whom the argument is addressed. These considerations determine what information constitutes "facts" and "reasonableness" and thus help to determine the universal audience that, in turn, shapes the orator's approach. /// The adherence of an audience is also determined by the orator's use of values, a further key concept of the New Rhetoric. Perelman's treatment of value and his view of epideictic rhetoric sets his approach apart from that of the ancients and of Aristotle in particular. Aristotle's division of rhetoric into three genres–forensic, deliberative, and epideictic–is largely motivated by the judgments required for each: forensic or legal arguments require verdicts on past action, deliberative or political rhetoric seeks judgment on future action, and epideictic or ceremonial rhetoric concerns values associated with praise or blame and seeks no specific decisions. For Aristotle, the epideictic genre was of limited importance in the civic realm since it did not concern facts or policies. Perelman, in contrast, believes not only that epideictic rhetoric warrants more attention, but that the values normally limited to that genre are in fact central to all argumentation. "Epideictic oratory," Perelman argues, "has significant and important argumentation for strengthening the disposition toward action by increasing adherence to the values it lauds.” These values are central to the persuasiveness of arguments in all rhetorical genres since the orator always attempts to "establish a sense of communion centered around particular values recognized by the audience.”. (shrink)

Combining ethnographic, semiotic, and performative approaches, this book examines texts and accompanying acts of writing of national commemoration. The commemorative visitor book is viewed as a mobilized stage, a communication medium, where visitors' public performances are presented, and where acts of participation are authored and composed. The study contextualizes the visitor book within the material and ideological environment where it is positioned and where it functions. The semiotics of commemoration are mirrored in the visitor book, which functions as a participatory (...) platform that becomes an extension of the commemorative spaces in the museum. The study addresses tourists' and visitors' texts, i.e. the commemorative entries in the book, which are succinct dialogical utterances. Through these public performances, individuals and groups of visitors align and affiliate with a larger imagined national community. Reading the entries allows a unique perspective on communication practices and processes, and vividly illustrates such concepts as genre, voice, addressivity, indexicality, and the very acts of writing and reading. The book's many entries tell stories of affirming, but also resisting the narrative tenets of Zionist national identity, and they illustrate the politics of gender and ethnicity in Israel society. The book presents many ethnographic observations and interviews, which were done both with the management of the site, and with the visitors themselves. The observations shed light on processes and practices involved in writing and reading, and on how visitors decide on what to write and how they collaborate on drafting their entries. The interviews with the site's management also illuminate the commemoration projects, and how museums and exhibitions are staged and managed. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss some of the mathematics behind an often quoted existence theorem from Richard Jeffrey's The Logic of Decision (Jeffrey 1990) in order to pose several new questions about the meaning and value of that mathematics for decision theory.

This paper examines the origins and influences of the introduction of longitudinal student data-sets as a way of gaining insight into the operation of American schools and as a tool for policy-makers. The paper argues that the creation of this new form of data in the 1960s and 1970s represented a relatively new way of thinking about American schools that allowed policy-makers to view the American education system as relatively uniform and the goal of policy to optimize its function. The (...) use of data in this way produced, somewhat paradoxically, a higher precision and more distorted view of the American schooling. The detailed picture provided by these data-sets offered policy-makers new and important insights into the pathways through schooling of individual students while at the same time presented scholars and policy-makers with an increasingly abstract and decontextualized view of the American education system as a whole. That is to say, to view the system uniform and national terms. The upshot... (shrink)

In this paper we prove, under the assumption of a strong partition property for an uncountable cardinal κ, the existence of more than κ-many measurable cardinals greater than κ. Our proof involves so-called seminormal measures, and, along the way, we establish several key facts about such measures.

In this paper we prove, under the assumption of a strong partition property for an uncountable cardinal $\kappa$, the existence of more than $\kappa$-many measurable cardinals greater than $\kappa$. Our proof involves so-called seminormal measures, and, along the way, we establish several key facts about such measures.

ABSTRACT In the course of her defence of German protesters against Peter Singer's lectures, Jenny Teichman claims that the right to make use of a public platform is not covered by the principle of freedom of expression. I argue that this view is mistaken, and that she is also wrong to focus on whether Singer deserved a public platform. Instead I suggest that what matters is whether there was an attempt to prevent communication between a speaker and willing hearers. But (...) I agree with Teichman that there are some relevant differences between speaking from a public platform and speaking privately. In particular I argue that protesters have a right, though not one based on freedom of expression, to interrupt a public speaker. Such a right is on a par with the speaker's freedom to draw public attention to the fact that she has opinions which she thinks worthy of a hearing, and in exercising it a protester must not prevent those who wish to hear the speech from doing so. Finally I offer an argument against the view that disrupting Singer's lectures could be seen as a justified interference with freedom of expression. (shrink)