The article examines the relationship between a wrongdoer and his victim. Based on this examination, a justification for criminal punishment is proposed. It is argued that crime violates thea prioriequality of constituent boundaries and of infinite human value between the wrongdoer and the victim. Criminal punishment re-equalizes respective boundaries and infinite human value. To develop this argument, the article observes how subject-subject boundaries are essential for the formation of separateness between subjects - separateness which is recognized and acknowledged by them (...) in a cooperative process. The article further discusses the value of boundaries and the significance of theira prioriequality in every human relationship. It then shows how crime, which is intrusion of the victim’s boundaries, works to demolish the victim’s self-recognizing separateness and hence to create inequality in the parties’ value. Last, the article demonstrates that only punishment can reset the relationship between the parties and re-equate their (still infinite) human value in the relationship. (shrink)

The goal in this article is to compare Bergson’s and Whitehead’s treatment of language and in particular the extent to which each believed that language is capable of expressing the temporal dimension of experience.

We live in an era characterized by technology as an integral part of the overall experiences. Non-hierarchic access to communication and virtual contacts in the metaverse, experienced as no less real than those in the brick-and-mortar world. The global health crisis has further highlighted the understanding that the integration of technology into our lives is inevitable, and when it comes to teaching and learning, the right use of technology can take teachers and learners to new, exciting places. The social distancing (...) regulations imposed worldwide provided educators with an opportunity to try out a variety of technological tools that enable surprising collaborations and access to information that encourages cognitive flexibility and a reexamination of our assumptions on knowledge, learning, teaching, human interaction, and space-time’s limitations. However, one great challenge within this ongoing transition concerns underprepared educators, feeling the pressure to make a successful shift while sustaining their educational inner compass regarding what constitutes adequate education. In this teacher’s self-study, I examined my teaching experience while teaching online. Informed by existing research, critical reflections, dialogue with a critical friend, a community of colleagues, and students’ artifacts, I inquire whether—and how—I can practice dialogical pedagogy while teaching online. (shrink)

In this Paper I examine Wittgenstein’s appeals to madness in On Certainty in light of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie. A close look at these works, usually conceived as disparate, belonging to entirely different schools of thought, reveals they actually have much in common. Both can be read as investigations into the grounds of reason, and while they offer quite different and distinct perspectives on the matter, share some central insights. In both we find that the boundaries of reason are (...) not only vague but are also largely founded upon the relations - social in Foucault, socio-linguistic in Wittgenstein - between the reasonable man and the unreasonable man. Both perspectives reveal a curious state of affairs, whereby the reasonable man is the one who dominates discourse, and yet, in his claim for reason, remains forever dependent upon the unreasonable man and his rejection. The pressing question triggered by Foucault's account is whether the boundary between reason and unreason is at all necessary. This undermines Wittgenstein’s thesis that this boundary is a matter of logical necessity, upon which discourse depends. I flesh this point out in the paper also by examining the differences in Wittgenstein’s and Foucalt’s treatments of Descartes’ Meditations. I conclude that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Cartesian skepticism presented in On Certainty loses much of its fortitude once examined in light of Foucault's Histoire de la folie. (shrink)

In this paper I examine Wittgenstein’s appeals to madness in On Certainty in light of Foucault’s Histoire de la folie. A close look at these works, usually conceived as disparate, belonging to entirely different schools of thought, reveals they actually have much in common. Both can be read as investigations into the grounds of reason, and while they offer quite different and distinct perspectives on the matter, they share some central insights. In both we find that the boundaries of reason (...) are not only vague but also largely founded upon the relations - social in Foucault, socio-linguistic in Wittgenstein - between the reasonable person and the unreasonable person. Both perspectives reveal a curious state of affairs whereby the reasonable person is the one who dominates discourse, and yet, in his claim for reason, remains forever dependent upon the unreasonable person and his rejection. The pressing question triggered by Foucault's account is whether the boundary between reason and unreason is at all necessary. This undermines Wittgenstein’s thesis that this boundary is a matter of logical necessity upon which discourse depends. I flesh this point out in the paper also by examining the differences in Wittgenstein’s and Foucault’s treatments of Descartes’ Meditations. I conclude that Wittgenstein’s criticism of Cartesian skepticism presented in On Certainty loses much of its fortitude once examined in light of Foucault's Histoire de la folie. (shrink)

One of the distinctive features of the primate genome is the Alu element, a repetitive short interspersed element, over a million highly similar copies of which account for >10% of the genome. A direct consequence of this feature is that primates' transcriptome is highly enriched in long stable dsRNA structures, the preferred target of adenosine deaminases acting on RNAs (ADARs), which are the enzymes catalyzing A‐to‐I RNA editing. Indeed, A‐to‐I editing by ADARs is extremely abundant in primates: over a hundred (...) million editing sites exist in their genomes. However, there are few essential editing sites conserved across mammals that have maintained their editing level despite the radical change in ADAR target landscape. Here, we review and discuss the cost of having an unusual amount of dsRNA and editing in the transcriptome, as well as the opportunities it presents, which might have contributed to the accelerated evolution of the primates. (shrink)

This paper examines the role that Leibniz’s philosophy played in the debate between the Idealists and their opponents at the turn of the twentieth century. While it is Russell’s The Philosophy of Leibniz which is most frequently referred to in this context, this paper focuses on John Dewey’s Leibniz’s New Essays which was written twelve years earlier, during the Hegelian phase of Dewey’s career. It is important to shift our attention to Dewey’s commentary not only because it has been almost (...) entirely neglected, but also because it provides a broader perspective on the role of the Leibnizian system in one of the leading debates in the history of philosophy, namely the debate over the intelligibility of the idea of internal relations. In particular, Dewey’s book reveals Leibniz’s involvement in the emergence of the notion of organism which was at the heart of the debate. (shrink)

In his Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man Thomas Reid draws an analogy between his notion of the self and Leibniz’s notion of a monad. Reid formulates this analogy in order to highlight what he considers to be the essential feature of the self: its unified and indivisible structure. This paper considers Reid’s analogy in the specific context of the diachronic aspect of substantial unity. Its focus is specifically on the role that the idea of continuity plays in establishing (...) the unity and indivisibility of the entities in question (viz., the self and the monad). As part of the ongoing debate over Leibniz’s mature metaphysics of substance, this paper highlights the positive implication of Reid’s analysis of the self (usually viewed as a critical reaction to Locke and Hume) and its place within the early modern debate over the nature of substantial unity. (shrink)

Leibniz’s and Whitehead’s analyses of motion are at the heart of their metaphysical schemes. These schemes are to be considered as two blueprints of a similar metaphysical intuition that emerged during two breakthrough eras, that is, the 17th century and the beginning of the 20th century, and retained the Aristotelian idea that existence requires an active principle. The two philosophers’ attempts to elucidate this idea in the context of their analyses of motion still interact with central, longstanding questions in philosophy, (...) in particular that concerning the ontological status of change. For both thinkers, the phenomenon of motion is an example par excellence, of the metaphysically fundamental principle of action that is required for change in the world. I focus on Leibniz’s and Whitehead’s similar understanding of the concept of transition that is inserted as an essential constitutive component of motion and ensures its status as something real.Keywords: Gottfried Leibniz; Alfred Whitehead; Motion; Change; Relativity; Transition. (shrink)

In the following pages, I make an argument on behalf of “wisdom education,” i.e., an approach to education that emphasizes the development of better thinking skills as well as socialization and the development of students’ sense-of-self. Wisdom education can best be facilitated through dialogical interactions that encourage critical reflection and modification of one’s presuppositions. This account presupposes that wisdom is given to dialectical forces. While the paper is primarily theoretical, it touches upon my work as a teachers’ educator, which almost (...) always utilizes dialogical pedagogies in the belief that these pedagogies are potent platforms for better learning and thinking and thus are more meaningful and transformative. (shrink)

This paper offers a new look at Whitehead’s criticism of Leibniz’s metaphysics and at the role this criticism plays in the broader context of Whitehead’s philosophy. A re-evaluation of Whitehead’s reading is called for since he takes his own system as an elaboration of the Leibnizian one, and as an effort to overcome what he deemed its major difficulties. Whitehead’s alternative, which is formulated in terms of real connectivity among basic constituents, is aimed at solving what he takes to be (...) the most problematic issue within Leibniz’s system, namely, the analysis of phenomenal continuity. However, I claim that Whitehead’s criticism obscures the fact that he is much closer to Leibniz than he is willing to admit. (shrink)

One of the leading theories of social learning today is Wenger's theory of Communities of Practice'. CoP-theory reiterates basic tenets of social learning theory yet it us set apart from other theories of social learning and education not only by centering on identity-formation but by positing four key dualities as inherent structural features of the educational process. While concurring with Wenger's 'dilemmatic' understanding of education and his open-ended, practice-based conception of identity-formation, we argue that Wenger's theory overlooks central elements that (...) are needed in order to fully articulate the ends of the educational process, as he conceives them. We claim that further supplementation is needed to support the kind of educational processes that Wenger advocates. Referring to the work of Jack Mezirow and Charles Taylor, this supplementation concerns both critical reflection and 'ethical imagination'. Rather than threatening the coherency of the theory, we claim that these supplementations are internally derived from the ends of CoP-theory and are necessary for its very possibility. To remain in line with Wenger's dilemmatic structure of education, these supplementations are presented in the form of a duality: the tension between artistic and ethical imagination. (shrink)

The selection of nineteenth-century Arabic texts on medical education, medicine and health demonstrates the significant link between the revival of the Arabic language and literary culture of the nineteenth century, known as thenahda, and the introduction of medical education to the Ottoman Empire. These include doctor Ibrahim al-Najjar's autobiographical account of his studies in Cairo (1855), an article by doctor Amin Abi Khatir advising on the health and care of infants (1877), questions and answers in the major popular Arabic journalsal-Hilalandal-Muqtataf(1877–1901) (...) and an article about a new tuberculosis treatment by doctor Anisa Sayba‘a (1903). Taken together they contribute to our understanding of the bottom-up production, reproduction and reception of global scientific knowledge, as well as to a social and intellectual history of science. We argue that the engagement with science during thenahdawas a multi-vocal and dialogical process, in which doctors and patients, journal editors and their readers, negotiated the implications of scientific knowledge for their own lives and their own society. The texts of the original documents and their translations can be found in the supplementary material tab athttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0007087422000413. (shrink)

We argue in this paper that Leibniz’s characterization of a substance as “un être” in his correspondence with Arnauld stresses the per se unity of substance rather than oneness in number. We employ two central lines of reasoning. The first is a response to Mogens Lærke’s claim that one can mark the difference between Spinoza and Leibniz by observing that, while Spinoza’s notion of substance is essentially non-numerical, Leibniz’s view of substance is numerical. We argue that Leibniz, like Spinoza, qualifies (...) the substance as “one” primarily in a non-numerical sense, where non-numerical means per se unity or qualitative uniqueness. The second line of reasoning suggests that the term “one” should be understood as a-unity-presupposed-by-multiplicity in two senses: a) externally, in the sense of being presupposed by higher complex structures, such as aggregates, and, b) internally, in the sense of having itself a complex structure. We develop an analogy along these lines between the role the notion of a fundamental unity plays in Leibniz’s view of numbers and his view of substance. In other words, we suggest that looking at the role units play in Leibniz’s view of mathematics can shed some light on the role they play in his metaphysics. (shrink)

Psychodrama is a therapeutic method in which the stage is used to enact and reenact life events with the aim of instilling, among other positive changes, hope and empowerment in a wide range of populations suffering from psychological duress. The therapeutic process in psychodrama moves away from the classic treatment of the individual in isolation to treatment of the individual in the context of a group. In domestic violence situations, in which abusive men seek to socially isolate their victims from (...) family and friends, the social support that psychodrama provides can positively influence the psychological health and well-being of the participants. This qualitative study examines the manner in which psychodramatic treatment can empower abused women residing in domestic violence shelters and help them regain control of their lives. An action research study of domestic violence survivors living in a women's shelter in Israel, over a 12-month period, demonstrates the role of psychodrama therapy in promoting the reduction of anxiety, stress, guilt, and self-blame, while reinforcing perceptions of self-worth and confidence. These findings contribute to our understanding of the potential of psychodrama in helping reshape life roles and reframe experiences within a creative process, with the aim of facilitating a transition from powerlessness to powerfulness among vulnerable populations. (shrink)

What is the relation between knowledge and orientation? How does being disoriented lead one to new knowledge or/and to being humbled about not knowing? How can not knowing aid in liberatory struggles, in alleviating oppression or even in being in community with like-minded people in an ethical manner? These are some of the questions that Ami Harbin’s work “Disorientation and Moral Life” brought up for me and which I would like to explore below, using prison abolition as one brief example.

In recent years, the field of art therapy has sought to adapt traditional treatment approaches to today’s innovative technological environments when working with adolescent “digital natives.” In their clinic, art therapists often struggle with lack of cooperation when treating adolescents during sessions. This article presents two case studies that explore how Virtual Reality technology can be combined with traditional art therapy to treat adolescents suffering from anxiety and social difficulties. It is suggested that this type of technology may lead to (...) a better understanding of the needs of adolescents by adopting their vantage point and hence better outcomes. (shrink)

In the wake of profound social changes, which have been accelerated due to a global pandemic, educators reconsider the role and goals of education, and subsequently, how its pragmatic expression should look like in a VUCA-world. We address this challenge by offering basic tenets of education and principles that are tailored to the current reality. We concentrate primarily on the merits of embracing dualities, dilemmas and tensions, for engaging in deep learning and personal development. Jon Wergin’s theory of ‘deep learning’ (...) and aspects of Etienne Wenger’s theory of ‘communities of practice’ provide a fertile framework for this endeavor. Arnett’s concept of ‘emerging adulthood’ provides an additional theoretical resource for connecting principles of education to a timely perception of personal development. Based on the notion of ‘emerging adulthood’, we offer four principles of education, articulated in the form of dualities, along with examples of how to implement these principles at college-level education. (shrink)

Human listeners are assumed to apply different strategies to improve speech recognition in background noise. Young listeners with normal hearing, e.g., have been shown to follow the voice of a particular speaker based on the fundamental and formant frequencies, which are both influenced by the gender, age, and size of the speaker. However, the auditory and cognitive processes that underlie the extraction and discrimination of these voice cues across speakers may be subject to age-related decline. The present study aimed to (...) examine the utilization of F0 and formant cues for voice discrimination in older adults with hearing expected for their age. Difference limens for VD were estimated in 15 healthy older adults and 35 young adults using only F0 cues, only formant frequency cues, and a combination of F0 + formant frequencies. A three-alternative forced-choice paradigm with an adaptive-tracking threshold-seeking procedure was used. Wechsler backward digit span test was used as a measure of auditory working memory. Trail Making Test was used to provide cognitive information reflecting a combined effect of processing speed, mental flexibility, and executive control abilities. The results showed that the mean VD thresholds of the older adults were poorer than those of the young adults for all voice cues, although larger variability was observed among the older listeners; both age groups found the formant cues more beneficial for VD, compared to the F0 cues, and the combined cues resulted in better thresholds, compared to each cue separately; significant associations were found for the older adults in the combined F0 + formant condition between VD and TMT scores, and between VD and hearing sensitivity, supporting the notion that a decline with age in both top-down and bottom-up mechanisms may hamper the ability of older adults to discriminate between voices. The present findings suggest that older listeners may have difficulty following the voice of a specific speaker and thus implementing doing so as a strategy for listening amid noise. This may contribute to understanding their reported difficulty listening in adverse conditions. (shrink)

Understanding time investment while solving problems is central to metacognitive research. By the Diminishing Criterion Model (DCM), time regulation is guided by two stopping rules: a confidence criterion that drops as time is invested in each problem and the maximum time to be invested. This combination generates curved confidence–time associations. We compared the belief that intelligence is malleable, a growth mindset, to the belief that intelligence is fixed, and to neutral control groups. We hypothesized that a growth mindset leads people (...) to selectively invest time in problems carrying the hope of improvement. This extra time makes the curved DCM pattern curvier. In two experiments, participants primed with growth, fixed, or control mindsets solved analogies (Experiment 1) and compound remote associates (Experiment 2). As expected, in both experiments a growth mindset exhibited a curvier confidence–time pattern, while the fixed mindset and control groups replicated previous confidence–time associations. Most additional time was invested in problems with intermediate difficulty levels, suggesting strategic time allocation. The study offers useful measures for delving into factors that affect thinking time allocation. (shrink)

Older adults with age-related hearing loss exhibit substantial individual differences in speech perception in adverse listening conditions. We propose that the ability to rapidly adapt to changes in the auditory environment is among the processes contributing to these individual differences, in addition to the cognitive and sensory processes that were explored in the past. Seventy older adults with age-related hearing loss participated in this study. We assessed the relative contribution of hearing acuity, cognitive factors, rapid perceptual learning of time-compressed speech, (...) and hearing aid use to the perception of speech presented at a natural fast rate, speech embedded in babble noise, and competing speech. Speech perception was modeled as a function of the other variables. For fast speech, age [odds ratio = 0.79], hearing acuity, pre-learning perception of time-compressed speech, and rapid perceptual learning were all significant predictors. For speech in noise, only hearing and pre-learning perception of time-compressed speech were significant predictors. Consistent with previous findings, the severity of hearing loss and auditory processing was strong contributors to individual differences in fast speech and speech in noise perception. Furthermore, older adults with good rapid perceptual learning can use this capacity to partially offset the effects of age and hearing loss on the perception of speech presented at fast conversational rates. Our results highlight the potential contribution of dynamic processes to speech perception. (shrink)

One of the intriguing issues connected to power relations in the world of cinema that has yet to be adequately explored is what has happened over the years concerning the dominance and privilege of masculinity as signifying preferred social status. This qualitative study explores this subject based on transcribed semi-structured interviews with 13 award-winning Israeli directors over the age of 55. The research examines two questions: How has the film industry changed its relation to leading, award-winning film directors as they (...) grow older? And, what challenges confront the directors, in terms of their own self-perceptions? These questions capture the collisional intersection between hegemonic masculinity and ageism, because they examine the loss of power attributed to men in the film industry as they reach the second half of their lives. The findings led to the formation of a theoretical model of ageism within the cinematic industry, allowing for the dismantling of the different factors that create obstacles for directors as they get older. The four layers of the model are: arbitrary ageism, manifested in the demands of a rapidly changing industry in a changing world; passive ageism, expressed through encounters with negative attitudes; active ageism, reflected in preventing older directors from receiving funding and from screening their films; and self-ageism, manifested in the directors’ attitudes toward themselves. (shrink)

A wealth of research documents the critical role of trust for social exchange and cooperative behavior. The ability to inspire trust in others can often be elusive, and distrust can have adverse interpersonal and ethical consequences. Drawing from the literature on social hierarchy and interpersonal judgments, the current research explores the predictive role of a structural paradox between high power and low status in identifying the actors most likely to be distrusted and monitored for ethical misconduct. Across four studies and (...) an internal meta-analysis, we found that the structural paradox was associated with distrust-related judgments and behaviors. In Study 1, high power-low status actors were judged as less trustworthy. In Studies 2 and 3, high power-low status actors were sent less money in a trust game, an effect fully mediated by feelings of dislike. Study 4 revealed that high power-low status actors were more likely to be monitored for cheating, an effect partially mediated by trust judgments. These findings contribute to business ethics research by identifying the structural paradox of high power-low status as a salient contextual influence impacting observers’ distrust and monitoring dynamics. Implications for reducing observers’ level of distrust of high power-low status actors are discussed. (shrink)