This research outlines the concept of resurrection from the ancient Hebrew Torah to Rabbinic Judaism and Christianity according to authoritative and linguistically accurate scriptures accompanied by English translations. Although some contemporary scholars are of the opinion that resurrection is vaguely portrayed in the Hebrew Torah, our research into the ancient texts offers quotes and provides proofs to the contrary. With the passing time, the concept of the resurrection grew even stronger and became one of the most important doctrines (...) of Judaism, enjoined as one of the thirteen articles of faith by Maimonides in the Mishnah. Imitative of the Jewish concept of God reaching out to save Israelites from gehenna, Jesus’ crucifixion and death for the sins of the world, resurrection on the third day, descend into the hells and subsequent rise into heavens became the essential foundation of Christianity, with Christ's resurrection as the impetus for the resurrection of those who believe in him. According to this Pauline theology, Christian faith is based upon the resurrection of Jesus and the hope for a life after death. (shrink)

Some of the manuscripts once part of Giovanni Pico della Mirandola’s collection transmit autograph notes, which have been useful to reconstruct his library. A peculiar case is represented by the notes transmitted in a codex containing the Latin translation of Moses Maimonides’ Guide of the Perplexed. These notes are actual corrections to the translation made mostly on the basis of a comparison with the Hebrew text, while in some other cases they derive from a specific interpretation. The aim (...) of this paper is to present some characteristics of the textual revisions, in particular with reference to the Hebrew source. The palaeographic data demonstrate Pico’s direct involvement, which leads to the question of the authorship of these notes, namely if they were the result of an autonomous work or of a collaboration with some other scholar. (shrink)

It is the view of most people who claim the authoritative nature of the Bible that, women’s assigned secondary status in relation to men is ordained and supported in the Bible. Many have quoted different texts of the holy writ to support their culturally-biased position on issue of gender equality. Most often views in respect to gender issues are culturally-based and interpreted rather than divinely-based and interpreted. There is therefore the need to look back at Jesus’ words, “But at the (...) beginning of creation God 'made them male and female.” (Matt 19:4; Mark 10:6). The two accounts in the Book of Genesis by the Priestly and Yahwistic strands give a complimentary account of the creation of humankind (both male and female) in the image and likeness of God and their creation from a single stock (<d*aº*) who was not a male gender. At a cursory reading of the creation accounts, one will tend to see <d„`ah*³ as the male gender, but looking at the Hebrew text more closely it will be noticed that the Hebrew words hV*aÍ !and vya !were only introduced after the two genders have been separated. Note carefully that it was not vya! that was asked to tend the garden, who named the animals, was given instruction of what to eat or what not to eat, who fell into a deep sleep or whose ribs was used in the creation of hV*aÍ!, but it was <d„`ah*³ . It was after the creation or ‘separation’ of hVÍ*a ! (woman – the female <d„`ah*³) that the other part was called vya ! (man – the male <d„`ah*³) (see vv 23 & 24). It will therefore not be right to speak of the creation of hV*aÍ ! out of vya!, because as at the time of the creation of the former, the later was not in existence as vya ! To view these creation accounts with the sense of gender superiority (either male over female or vice versa) is to read the texts using lenses which have been obscured and tainted by patriarchal, matriarchal or cultural biases. (shrink)

This research aims to contribute to the discussion on the subject of Abortion by analyzing the concepts of formed and unformed in the Septuagint in Exodus 21:22-23, and the opinions of St. Augustine and St. Thomas Aquinas on the social status of the fetus. The Greek version of the Hebrew Bible, which was translated in stages into Greek between the 3rd century BC and the 1st century BC, presents a different point of view than that found in the (...) class='Hi'>Hebrew text of Exodus 21:22-23. It introduces the notions of formed and unformed fetus. In other words, he understood the fetus (embryo) in a perspective of developing reality. Augustine and Aquinas, two important names in Christian theology, seem to have reflected a tradition that granted protection to the unborn child according to the stages of its development. The discussion around the topic of abortion is complex, very sensitive, but it should not be avoided. Bibliographical research was used as methodology. As a result, it will be pointed out that the biblical presentation of human beings does not begin with an explanation of conception or the fetal period. It does not discuss the point at which the embryo attains the full moral status of a human person. Thus, for this research, the discussion about abortion must necessarily take into account issues such as risk to the pregnant woman's life; fetal malformation etc. But, above all, it must be centered on the personality of the pregnant woman. (shrink)

The reading of Genesis 18,20 does not make clear what the sin of Sodom is. The Hebrew text only says that the transgression of the inhabitants of that city was greatly aggravated: “וחַטָּאתָּם” –“vëchatåtåm” -“כָּבְ דָּה” –“khåvëdåh” -“מְ אֹד” –“mëod”. Even the passage in Gen 19,5 gives no clue to a specific sin: in this passage it seems more evident that the sodomites are violating the normal canons of hospitality. But then why do popular imaginations and some interpreters (...) identify the sin of Sodom with homosexuality? This research will demonstrate that a number of factors led to this type of interpretation. First it was understood that Gen 19,5 gave an indication of the sexual orientation of the inhabitants of Sodom; then the passages of Leviticus 18,22 and 20,13 were invoked to regulate this opinion; the next step was to connect Gen 18,20 and 19,5 with Paul’s comments in Romans 1 in which the sin of Sodom was associated with homosexual sex. This connection was sustained by Augustine and also by the author of “Visio Sancti Pauli”. The coming together of these factors was the catalyst for later traditions in which the sin of Sodom is presented as homosexual sex. (shrink)

Discussion of a short text on ethics, originally Greek, translated into Arabic and Hebrew, and adopted by some Christians, Muslims and Jews for guiding their lives.

The German text of Cohen’s Spinoza on State & Religion, Judaism & Christianity (Spinoza über Staat und Religion, Judentum und Christentum) first appeared in 1915 in the Jahrbuch für jüdische Geschichte und Literatur. Two years before, in the winter of 1913, Cohen taught a class and a seminar on Spinoza’s Theological-Political Treatise at the Hochschule für die Wissenschaft des Judentums. This was Cohen’s first semester at the Hochschule, after retiring from more than thirty years of teaching at the University (...) of Marburg. Cohen’s fame at the time was at its zenith, and his move to the Hochschule was a cause for celebration and excitement. According to the testimony of some students who attended the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus seminar, Cohen left no place for any expression of dissent (regrettably, the academy frequently encourages such authoritarian behavior). The text of Spinoza on State, which was the product of this seminar, still bears the marks of this “didactic” attitude. It is bombastic and feebly argued. Thus, in one moment of emotional crescendo in the text, we can literally hear Cohen shout: When Spinoza, with merciless severity, makes his own nation the object of contempt – at the time that Rembrandt lived on the same street and immortalized the ideal type of the Jew - no voices rises in protest against this humanly incomprehensible betrayal. Such patriotic rhetoric is quite typical of Cohen’s Spinoza on State, as the work reads more like a series of rants against the devil incarnated (“the demonic spirit of Spinoza”) in the figure of the traitor from Amsterdam than like a sustained and serious philosophical polemic. From time to time, one can observe hints of critical arguments, but hardly any are fleshed out. The text is also replete with rudimentary factual and interpretative errors. Thus, when Cohen argues that Spinoza traces his pantheism to Jewish sources, Cohen erroneously cites Spinoza’s reference in E2p7s to “some of the Hebrews [quidam Hebraeorum]” who argued for the identity of Sekhel, Maskil, and Muskal (the Intellect, the Intellecting Subject, and the Intellected Object) – a Maimonidean doctrine that has nothing to do with pantheism – while the text Cohen clearly had in mind was Spinoza’s claim, in Letter 73, that the traditions (traditionibus) of the “ancient Hebrews [antiquis Hebraeis]” agree with Spinoza’s claim that “all things are in God.” Similarly, and on the very same page, Cohen ascribes to Spinoza the claim that “the God of the Old Testament is only a body,” a claim which is nowhere to be found in Spinoza’s works, and which can be inferred from Spinoza’s text only through a patent fallacy. If I may add one last example, consider the following passage from Cohen’s Spinoza on State: [For Spinoza] divine law is grounded in our mind. Yet this does not mean that our mind bears responsibility for producing and obeying the law. Instead, it means that, by definition, the human mind and God are identical, inasmuch as He exists in the human mind. Hardly any claim in this brief passage is correct. Yet, what is most striking is Cohen’s derivation of the identity of God and the human mind from the claim that God exists in the human mind. If I exist in North America, this obviously does not imply that I am identical to North America (there are, for example, a couple of North American porcupines and alligators that are distinct from me). What rule of inference Cohen sought to employ in this argument, and how this impressive inference of the identity of God and the human mind is supposed to square with Cohen’s view of Spinoza as a pantheist – i.e., as considering the physical nature to be divine – is beyond my grasp. Instead of tracking down the dozens of crude errors and fallacies in Cohen’s text, I would like to concentrate here on one crucial issue: Cohen’s critique of Spinoza’s pantheism. By doing this, I will have to pass silently over a couple of surprising agreements between the two figures, such as the (false) claim that all of the prophets of the Hebrew Bible taught the same universal and simple morality. My discussion of pantheism will be divided into two sections. In the first, I will examine Cohen’s understanding of Spinoza’s pantheism. In the second, I will briefly examine the historical validity of Cohen’s claim that pantheism is a Christian doctrine, diametrically opposed to Judaism. (shrink)

A philosophy of language that incorporates the manifestation of divinity shed liberally upon the psyche of humanity without violence or chaos as in that which is common to the powers and sovereignties of human beings is critical to the understanding of Holy Writ. The discourse presented here is primarily intended to foster a better general understanding of the divine directive given to Moses by Yahweh to build the wilderness sanctuary in order to objectify his majestic presence among them and draw (...) their attention periodically to his Shekinah glory. It is the author’s deep desire to encourage ministers of religion, students and teachers of theology, linguistics, philology, and grammar, to develop an approach to biblical studies that take into account the biblical languages that were the sheaths for the sword of the word. A cursory reading of this script should generate active interest in these languages. (shrink)

Medieval and early modern Jewish philosophers developed their thinking in conversation with various bodies of literature. The influence of ancient Greek – primarily Aristotle (and pseudo-Aristotle) – and Arabic sources was fundamental for the very constitution of medieval Jewish philosophical discourse. Toward the late Middle Ages Jewish philosophers also established a critical dialogue with Christian scholastics. Next to these philosophical corpora, Jewish philosophers drew significantly upon Rabbinic sources (Talmud and the numerous Midrashim) and the Hebrew Bible. In order to (...) clarify the unique as well as shared elements in the thought of medieval Jewish philosophers, we will begin this chapter with a brief study of some early Rabbinic sources on the purpose of the world, i.e., why it came to be and why it is sustained in existence. In the second part of this chapter, we will study Maimonides’ critique of the veracity and usefulness of the belief in (anthropocentric) teleology, and the critical reception of his views by later philosophers. The third part will address discussions of divine teleology in Kabbalistic literature. Our exposition will concentrate mostly on a specific early-eighteenth-century text that is one of the most lucid and rigorous presentations of Lurianic Kabbalah. The fourth and final section will elucidate Spinoza’s critique of teleology, its precise target and scope, and its debt to earlier sources discussed in this chapter. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to clarify Spinoza’s views on some of the most fundamental issues of his metaphysics: the nature of God’s attributes, the nature of existence and eternity, and the relation between essence and existence in God. While there is an extensive literature on each of these topics, it seems that the following question was hardly raised so far: What is, for Spinoza, the relation between God’s existence and the divine attributes? Given Spinoza’s claims that there are (...) intimate connections between God’s essence and his existence – “God’s essence and his existence are one and the same”(E1p20) – and between God’s essence and the attributes – “By attribute I understand what the intellect perceives of substance, as constituting its essence” (E1d4), we would naturally expect that by transitivity, there is a significant relation between God’s existence and the attributes. Yet, as far as I know, there is little, if any, attempt in the existing literature to explicate such a relation, and it is one of my aims of this study to both raise the question and answer it. Eventually, I will argue that for Spinoza God is nothing but existence, and that the divine attributes are just fundamental kinds of existence, or, what is the same, as I will later argue, the intellect’s most fundamental and adequate conceptions of existence. In the first part of the paper I provide some background for Spinoza’s brief discussion in the TTP of God’s name and essence by studying the claims of Maimonides in the Guide of the Perplexed that God’s true essence is necessary existence, and that this essence is denoted by the ineffable Hebrew name of God, the Tetragrammaton (YHVH). In the second part of the paper I point out similar claims Spinoza presents in the TTP, and show how they respond to and echo Maimonides’ discussion in the Guide. In the third part, I examine Spinoza’s apparently conflicting claims in the Ethics about the relationship between God’s essence and existence. In some places Spinoza claims that God’s essence and existence are strictly identical (E1p10: “God’s essence his existence are one and the same”), but in other passages he makes the apparently much more modest claim that God’s essence involves existence (E1d1, E1p7d and E1p11d), which may lead one to believe that there is more to God’s essence than mere existence. I show that Spinoza’s understanding of the relation denoted by the Latin ‘involvit’ is consistent with the strict identification of essence and existence in God, and that Spinoza identifies God’s essence with self-necessitated existence, or eternity. Indeed, Spinoza’s understanding of eternity [aeternitas] as self-necessitated existence (E1d8) is one of the very few Spinozistic concepts that has no trace in Descartes. In this part I will also solve the long-standing problem of the sense in which the infinite modes can be called ‘eternal.’ In the fourth part I turn to the relation between the divine attributes and God’s existence and argue that, for Spinoza, the attributes are self-sufficient and adequate conceptions of existence. Finally, I will attempt to explain what brought Spinoza to deify existence. -/- Part I: “In that Day shall God be One, and his Name One”- Maimonides on God’s Name and Essence. -/- 1.1 Before we delve into the texts, let me suggest a few distinctions between various views on the issue of the relation between essence and existence in God. The view I suspect both Maimonides and Spinoza subscribe to can be termed the divine essence-existence Identity Thesis. -/- Identity Thesis (IT): God’s essence is existence and nothing but existence. We should distinguish the Identity Thesis from the much more common view according to which God’s essence contains existence, or (which I take to be roughly the same) that existence is one of the properties or perfections which constitute God’s essence. The latter view allows for the possibility (though it does not demand) that there is more to God’s essence than bare existence (e.g., God’s essence may include omniscience, omnipotence, etc.). I will term this view the divine essence-existence Containment Thesis. (shrink)

Academic integrity is an essential pillar of any educational system. It is defined as acting in a manner consistent with the values and accepted standards of ethical practices in teaching, learning, and scholarship (Fishman, 2015). Contract cheating, or ghostwriting, is currently one of the most severe violations of academic integrity. It involves students engaging a third party, usually an online essay writing service, to complete their academic works on their behalf (Draper et al., 2021). Some of these services offer pre-written (...) essays, whereas others offer bespoke custom-written essays. According to the academic literature, the advent of the internet and digital technologies underlay this rapid deterioration of academic integrity (Ison, 2020; Lancaster & Clarke, 2014). Different learning environments, such as face-to-face (i.e., a learning environment involving the physical presence of both instructor and students) and online web-based (i.e., teaching mode that takes place partially or entirely over the internet), have been shown to affect academic integrity in different ways (Eshet et al., 2021). While contract cheating is common in both conventional face-to-face (F2F) and online settings, it is more likely to take place in the latter (Lancaster & Clarke, 2014; Slade et al., 2018). There are several possible explanations for why online students engage in contract cheating more often than F2F students. In particular, this includes the problem issue of psychological distance, which adversely affects interpersonal relationships; and the problem issue of moral distancing, because the internet can obscure the line between academically honest and dishonest behavior (Sharma & Maleyeff, 2003). These issues were further exacerbated by the sudden shift from F2F to emergency remote teaching (ERT) in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (Ahsan et al., 2021; Bjelobaba, 2021). Indeed, contract cheating had become a significant COVID-19 side effect for higher education institutions. In contrast to the well-planned F2F or online learning courses, ERTbased courses are not originally designed to be delivered virtually (Fatonia et al., 2020). The chaos brought by the abrupt campus closure and related unexpected transition to ERT provided both the opportunity and the incentive for contract cheating (Hill et al., 2021). Through social media, students have very quickly become fully aware of the possibilities of a wide variety of options to carry out Plagiarism (Bautista et al., 2022). There has been an increase in ways to try to bypass text-matching or text-reuse (i.e., plagiarism) detection systems, for example using micro-spaces, white ink, punctuation, and typos (Abdelhamid et al., 2022). Even though ghostwriters, especially commercial ones, claim their essays are original and therefore cannot be detected using text-matching software, third-party assignments may still contain recycled text (Aitken et al., 2017; Newton & Lang, 2015). Text matching detection software could use these breaches to identify outsourced academic work (Lancaster & Clarke, 2016; Wang & Xu, 2021). This study compared about four thousand term papers written in languages other than Hebrew. (shrink)

Averroes, considered to be the greatest Aristotelian commentator in the Middle Ages, has written three different types of commentary on almost all the works of this great philosopher: short, middle and long. These commentaries have been translated into Latin and Hebrew in the early period, and profoundly influenced both Medieval Europe and Jewish thought for centuries. The effect of Averroes in the West was to spread the whole of Europe under the name of Latin Averroism. The text what (...) you have consists of some remarks about the translation of the commentary on the ‘Book Alpha Meizon’, the second book of Averroes’ Tafsīr Mā Ba’d at-Tabī’a. (shrink)

The impermanence of human affairs is a major theme in Spinoza’s discussions of political histories, and from our present-day perspective it is both intriguing and ironic to see how this very theme has played out in the evolving fate of Spinoza’s association with atheism. While Spinoza’s contemporaries charged him with atheism in order to impugn his philosophy (and sometimes his character), in our times many lay readers and some scholars portray Spinoza as an atheist in order to commemorate his role (...) as a founder of modern secularism. In this paper, I will argue that Spinoza deserves neither vilification nor praise for being an atheist, for the simple reason that he was not one (unless one employs the term ‘atheism’ in a very peculiar sense). I have chosen the current topic as my contribution to a volume focused on the TTP, the Ethics, and their interrelations because it is precisely these two books which brought about the common reactionary accusation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries. Addressing Spinoza’s 1663 book, Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy, Bayle writes: “Spinoza appears as orthodox in that book about the nature of God.” As we shall shortly see, Descartes too was accused of atheism by some of his contemporaries (though not so by Bayle). The latter designates his target quite explicitly: “[Spinoza’s] Tractatus Theologico Politicus, printed in Amsterdam, in the year 1670, is a pernicious and execrable book which contains all the seeds of the Atheism he plainly discovered in his Opera Posthuma.” François Lamy, in his 1696 Le nouvel athéisme renversé, also focused on the Ethics and the TTP in his attack on Spinoza’s atheism. Bayle’s reference to the Opera Posthuma is ostensibly targeting the Ethics at least primarily, if not uniquely. Even the most suspicious and distrustful mind would have to labor hard in order to find atheism in the Hebrew Grammar, or even in the Tractatus Politicus where Spinoza argues that it is not within the power, and hence right, of the commonwealth to induce people to adopt utterly absurd beliefs, such as “that the whole is greater than its part or that God does not exist.” The TTP and the Ethics are the works where Spinoza launches his merciless attack on anthropocentric thinking and anthropomorphic religion. Spinoza’s panentheism (“quicquid est, in Deo est”) constitutes the metaphysical foundation of the Ethics, and it is repeatedly and clearly alluded to in the TTP. Since it is these two elements – (1) Spinoza’s open assertions of panentheism and (2) his critique of andromorphic conceptions of God – which are the historical grounds for the atheism charge, it seems natural that the merit of this charge should be decided primarily by examination of these two foundational works. I will proceed in the following manner. In the first part of the paper, we will make our first acquaintance with the imputation of atheism by Spinoza’s contemporaries and Spinoza’s response to the charge (or lack thereof). In the second part, I discuss three broad strategies, or hermeneutic avenues, that have been pursued to impute atheism to Spinoza. The first of the three was dominant in Spinoza’s time, while the latter two were employed more recently. These strategies are not mutually exclusive and we can find occasionally various combinations of different shades of these three strategies. In this part, I will also raise some preliminary questions about the cogency of the hermeneutics employed by each strategy. In the third and fourth parts of the paper, I will discuss a small selection of key texts from the Ethics and the TTP, respectively, and argue that the atheist readings fail to make sense of these key passages (unless one adopts an extreme hermeneutics of suspicion which could allegedly find any view harbored in any text). Let me stress that this selection of passages is far from comprehensive, and that dozens of other passages can be adduced to establish the very same point. I hope by the end of the fourth part to convince the reader of the deep problems besetting the atheist readings. In the fifth and last part, I show that both panentheism and the critique of anthropomorphic religion and anthropomorphic conceptions of providence were quite common within rabbinic discourse. Thus, I will argue that if we are not in the business of announcing that both Maimonides and the Kabbalists were atheists, we should avoid the same imputation to Spinoza. Underlying my argument in this final part is the claim that at least some perceptions of Spinoza as an atheist are instances of what could be termed conceptual colonialism, i.e. the enforcement of the categories of a hegemonic culture (in this case, Western Christianity ) on minority cultures (in the current case, rabbinic Judaism). To be clear, this attitude need not be motivated by ill intentions or racism. It is always tempting and easy to explain the unfamiliar through the familiar, but conceptual stagnation and insistence on imposing the categories of the familiar on other cultures may quickly lead to deep distortion and blindness, despite one’s best intentions. Unless one is exceedingly careful to avoid the – completely natural – temptation to impose one’s own categories on a foreign culture (and to look for the coin only under the street light), one is likely to end up with distorted conceptions of the relevant alien culture, despite one’s best intentions. (shrink)

This essay connects Kafka's German and his Jewish linguistic sources, and explores the trans-national perspective on literary tradition they helped him create. I begin with a critique of Deleuze and Guattari's view of Kafka as a minority writer, showing how their cold war nationalism scants the positive contributions that Yiddish and Hebrew made to his work. I continue with an examination of the "twilight of containment," when this postcontemporary Kafka began to break through his cold war canonization after 1989. (...) Other sections include: "German-Jewish Traditions: The Echoes of Yiddish," on Kafka's cultural politics; "Hebrew: Zionism in a Transnational Key"; and "Goethe's Jewish Voices," on Yiddish as a model for Kafka's new conception of national writing. I conclude by considering the Jewish and other sources of Kafka's "linguistic turn," and the general, transnational focus on tradition that Jewish languages brought to his classic texts. (shrink)

This chapter critically discusses the most salient positions about life’s meaning advanced by Koheleth, the presumed author of Ecclesiastes, a book from the Hebrew Bible. Koheleth famously argues that ‘life is futility’ (or ‘vanity’) for a variety of reasons, with this chapter focusing on the three that are most recurrent in the text and have been particularly influential in the Western tradition of philosophy. These are considerations about: the mortality of humankind, the undeserved allocations of benefits and burdens (...) we receive, and the inability to control our fate. (shrink)

I. Introduction Sex has been thought to reveal the most profound truths about individuals, laying bare their deepest desires and fears to their partners and themselves. In ‘Carnal Knowledge,’ Wendy Doniger states that this view is to be found in the texts of ancient India, in the Hebrew Bible, in Renaissance England and Europe, as well as in contemporary culture, including Hollywood films.1 Indeed, according to Josef Pieper, the original, Hebrew, meaning of `carnal knowledge’ was `immediate togetherness, intimate (...) presence.’ 10 But equally prevalent in both ancient and contemporary culture is the view that sex generates the deepest illusions, hiding people’s true selves behind layers of deception, blindness, deception, or self-deception.2 Tthere is, however, no contradiction in holding both that sexual deception and illusion blindness are widespread, and that sex reveals some profound truths about us. Indeed, if deception or illusion blindness about our sexual desires and fantasies is widespread, one likely explanation is surely that many of us implicitly or explicitly believe that our desires and fantasies say something important about us – or at least that we believe that others believe that they do. There is little reason to hide from ourselves or others that which we regard as unimportant. But while such blindness to or pretence about one’s own or partner’s sexual needs and desires saves one from embarrassment or from the effort to understand and satisfy one’s partner or oneself, it also subverts a central value of any fulfilling personal.. (shrink)

Matija Vlačić Ilirik was one of the pillars of Luther’s Reformation. In a special way, he dedicated himself to one of its most important issues – the understanding of the Scriptures, and can, therefore, be considered a significant instigator of the founding of modern hermeneutics. As an excellent connoisseur of classical languages (Hebrew, Greek and Latin) he recognized the importance and dealt with many issues of language, grammar, logic, and dialectic, as essential prerequisites for understanding everything which exists, and (...) hence of the written text also. In this connection, his skepticism towards philosophy is apparent, since the main source of theological cognition, for him, is revelation, and not the human reason, which was principally destroyed by Original Sin. He found the confirmation of his ideas in the current debates with both proponents and opponents of the Reformation, as well as in his research into church history, wherein he incessantly tried to find the witnesses of the truth, as he perceived it. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Spinoza: Une Lecture d'AristoteYitzhak MelamedFrédéric Manzini. Spinoza: Une Lecture d'Aristote. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2009. Pp. 334. Paper, $39.95.The occasion that prompted the current study was the discovery of a tiny typo in the text of Spinoza's Cogitata Metaphysica—the appendix to his 1663 book, Descartes' Principle of Philosophy. As it turned out, this typo, a reference to Book XI instead of Book XII of Aristotle's Metaphysics, (...) was inadvertently reproduced by Spinoza from a contemporary edition of Aristotle's works, allowing Manzini to identify precisely the edition used by Spinoza as the 1548 edition of Aristotle's works printed in Basel by Johannes Oporinus. It also led him to conclude that, contrary to the belief of many, Spinoza read Aristotle's text very closely, and convinced him of the importance of studying the dialogue between the two great philosophers.The book is comprised of three parts, reversing the order of Spinoza's presentation of his philosophy in the Ethics. The first part discusses Spinoza's ethical and political theories—where, the author claims, the influence of Aristotle is most manifest—against the background of the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics. Here, much attention is given to the notions of the summum bonum and beatitude. The second part discusses Aristotelian and Spinozistic theories of knowledge. In the third and final part, dedicated to metaphysics and first philosophy, the author compares the philosophers' absolutely impersonal conceptions of God, examines their conceptions of substance, and develops a reading of what he calls Spinoza's "ousio-theology" (305).According to Manzini, Aristotle was one of Spinoza's first major philosophical interlocutors, and there is no doubt he is right about this. This conclusion, however, is unsurprising, [End Page 126] since seventeenth-century philosophers, whether devoted Aristotelians or determined anti-Aristotelians, conversed in an Aristotelian philosophical language. Manzini shows that Spinoza engaged directly with Aristotle's text, but also tries to substantiate an even stronger claim by stressing the agreements between the two philosophers.There are two reasons that make it difficult to see Spinoza as being consciously and positively influenced by Aristotle, however. First, Spinoza's dialogue with his philosophical predecessors is, without exception, highly critical and polemical. He does not usually mention philosophers with whom he agrees (e.g. Crescas and Machiavelli). Secondly, several of Spinoza's explicit references to Aristotle are highly critical. Consider, for example, Spinoza's claim, in a letter to Hugo Boxel, that "the authority of Plato, Aristotle, and Socrates carries little weight with me" (Letter 56), or his mockery of the "delusions of the Aristotelians and Platonists" (Theological Political Treatise [TTP], Pref.; cf. ch. 13). Manzini suggests that in these passages Spinoza is not so much addressing Aristotle, but rather using him as a foil to target medieval Aristotelianism (13). Looking closely at the context, my impression is that he is right about the passages in the TTP, but not about the quote from Letter 56. More importantly, the claim that Spinoza uses Aristotle's name as a foil is a double-edged sword that may also serve to undermine Manzini's argument. Throughout the book, Manzini points out interesting and significant similarities between Spinoza's and Aristotle's texts, but to establish direct positive influence one must consider and rule out mediating agents. In the present case there is plenty of evidence that Spinoza read medieval Hebrew Aristotelians closely. Unfortunately, most of the Hebrew authors mentioned by Spinoza were never translated into modern European languages, and there are very few, if any, good studies of Spinoza's dialogue with these texts; in the absence of such translations and studies, some of Manzini's conclusions must remain tentative.Manzini's erudition and analysis of the text are impressive. For example, near the end of his celebrated Letter on the Infinite, Spinoza criticizes "recent Peripatetics" for misunderstanding the ancient method of proving God's existence, citing Crescas's correct formulation of the ancient proof. Manzini rightly points out that the proof Spinoza ascribes to the "recent Peripatetics" was in fact Aristotle's, while the alleged "ancient" proof (which allows for actual infinity and relies on Avicennian... (shrink)

In light of the recent developments featuring women around the world reclaiming their autonomy and self-respect in the face of male domination, it is becoming increasingly urgent to rethink the ancient “curse” on woman and the way that it has not only allowed but condoned male oppression and domination over women throughout the centuries. Rather than read the text through the traditional Aristotelian lens used by Church fathers to describe woman as the seductress and man as the legitimate authority (...) over woman’s corrupt nature, this paper proposes a radical re-reading of the “curse” of Genesis 3:16 as a redemptive rather than a punitive moment wherein the woman is given back her power as the ezer kenegdo of man, and man is given back his kingdom lost and his reign over the whole of Creation, or mashal, through the woman’s love, or teshuqah. This will entail that the two key concepts mashal and teshuqah be profoundly re-interpreted from a Hebrew inter-textual perspective rather than through a Greek philosophical lens. (shrink)

Abstract: Karl Jaspers describes The Axial Period (800-200 BCE) as a world-historical turning point in the spiritual evolution of the human species, characterized by the rise of Buddhism, Zoroastrianism, Pythagoreanism, and the Hebrew prophets, without precisely identifying what defines this world-historical period. What defines The Axial Period, I argue with Jaspers, is the sublimation of sacrifice, through which the sacrificial killing of domestic animals, characteristic of primitive religions, is sublimated into the self-sacrificial disciplines of prayer, meditation, and asceticism. This (...) sublimation of sacrifice involves a curiously duplicitous gesture, through which the sacred violence of primitive sacrifice is simultaneously sublimated into the self-sacrificial disciplines of the Western Indo-European religions, and demoted to the strictly physical violence of modern warfare, stripped of its sacred origins. I argue, against Jaspers, that there is no world-historical discontinuity between primitive and modern sacrifice, but rather a continuous trajectory of the sublimation of sacrifice in Western Indo-European cultures. The Brahminic sacred texts, the Rig Veda and the Brahmanas, for example, describe a sophisticated sacrificial ritualism that more effectively sublimates sacrificial violence than do Western European modern cultures, in which un-sacrificial violence continues to escalate, to challenge the survival of the contemporary world. (shrink)

What do we do with Judges? This two-edged word? This ambidextrous book? These ambivalent heroes? The Judges were drawing their last fleeting breaths shipwrecked and scattered upon the shores of historical-critical-grammatical-linear-modernist-masculine interpretation. "The narrative is primitive," they said. "The editors have made a mess," they exclaimed. "The conclusion is really an appendix," another said. Then the bible-acrobats jumped in pretending there was no literary carnage while at the same time drawing our eyes away from the literary carnage. "No, no, there (...) is an order to this disorderly book!" "Gideon is a man of faith," they explained. "Gideon is a sham," others retorted. "Long live the king," they cried. "Oh no, the king will bring down the nation," others said. Enter the latest literary critics and the fresh feminist readers to save the day. And save they have. Barry noted the irony. Cheryl called attention to the elaborate, spiraling labyrinth. Phyllis remembered the forgotten. Mieke heralded the incoherence. Deborah the Bee slings Barak with irony. Cowardly Jephthah sacrifices his virgin daughter immediately after he is filled with the spirit. Blind Samson remains stuck in some adolescent, Pinnochio-like stage milling around the same old vices. The Levite, the man of word and sacrifice, lies to the people and dismembers his wife. To beat it all the myopic narrator joins in lock step with the other blind characters stumbling around in the narrative. What manner of text is this? These Judges, these stories, are even more troubling now that we take them seriously. Now what do we do with Judges? The recent scholarship is most promising, but I think we must press forward, or is that backward, or perhaps to another plan. Perhaps Judges hearkens forward to the postmodern. What would Judges look like if we viewed the story through a postmodern lens? Would we see the text in another dimension? Would we let the characters live and breathe as confusing, confounding, intricate characters? Judges speaks to me. These judges, they teach me. How can I ever forget my reading of Judges? For once I found a text reflecting the madness of faith in my maddening world. For once I saw a text like Pablo. I heard the echo of Umberto. I noted the faint murmurings of Jacques. I danced a most joyous jig with Julia. I saw, up ahead, or was that behind me, or over to the side, Martin's flickering candle. Mieke, meet Jael. Barak, meet Barry. Jacques, meet Gideon. Samson, meet Martin. Umberto, meet the narrator or two or three. Pablo, meet the Levite's wife---sorry, she has no name. (shrink)

Comentario 2° en el marco de la tesis “Un Estudio en Metodología Intertextual y Exegética en Salmo 91” cuanto al uso conjugado de la figura del רגל en posición de sujeto gramatical del verbo מוט, uso que la referida investigación percibe, debido a su frecuencia y estabilidad, como una fraseología. (fecha de publicación del comentario en Academiaedu: 7/6/2022) . . . . Yo sigo trabajando en el sentido de buscar más evidencia que me permita seguir reforzando lo que sostengo desde (...) la tesis cuanto a que la formula retorica construida a partir del sustantivo רגל en posición de sujeto gramatical del verbo מוט tiene que ser entendida como una fraseología típica y preponderante en el discurso de la literatura hebrea (en este sentido, por ahora, solo puedo atreverme a aseverar serlo para aquélla del Mar Muerto y, aun así, delimitada, dicha relevancia, a los documentos en los cuales se verifica el empleo de la referida formula). En el capítulo 5° de la investigación en cuestión yo presento un listado de las veces las cuales la pude rastrear a través de los manuscritos los cuales tuve acceso durante el desarrollo del estudio. Aquí presento un caso más y debido a los aparentes desafíos que presenta la siguiente ocurrencia, esto es, a la luz de los demás casos ya expuestas en la tesis, estoy llevando a cabo un análisis más cuidado antes de dar mi parecer: . . . 11Q5 (Psalmsa 19:2) חי חי יודה לכה יודו לכה כול מוטטי רגל בהודיעכה . . . La lectura anterior también puede ser encontrada en el manuscrito 11Q6 (Psalmsb f4_5:5) . . . . Para el rastreo de la formula aquí en cuestión estoy usando las transcripciones de los manuscritos hebreos del Bibleworks 10 (hechas por Martin G. Abegg), aquéllas de Elisha Qimron (The Qumran Texts Composite Edition, 3 vols. 2d edition), aquéllas del sitio web MAAGARIM y también haciendo un rastreo visual (sin uso de mecanismos de búsqueda) de la base de datos de imágenes de The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, de aquélla de la Cambridge Digital Library, de aquélla del Israel Museum, de entre otras. . . . . De paso, en esta discusión que levanté en la tesis respecto a tradiciones literarias hebreas que podrían llegar a tener alguna clase de relación (misma autoría o alguna clase dependencia, derivación) con la composición del salmo 91, me gustaría traer a mesa el siguiente manuscrito el cual estoy analizando en este sentido: . . . 4Q365 (Reworked Pentateuchc f32:13). (shrink)

Scientific enterprise is a part and parcel of the contemporaneous to it general human cultural and, even more general, existential endeavor. Thus, the fundamental for us notion of evolution, in the modern sense of this characteristically Occidental term, appeared in the 19-th century, with its everything pervading, irreversible cultural and technological change and the existential turmoil. Similarly, a formerly relatively recherché word emergence, became a widely used scientific term only in the 20-th century, with its cultural, economical, political, and national (...) sagas of emergence and destruction played against a background of the universe emerging from the Big Bang and disappearing into its black holes, if not into its ultimate Big Collapse. Today, the rules of engagement in scientific emergence-evolution games, steadily spreading from natural to cognitive sciences, and beyond, are dominated by the 19-th century concept of natural selection which has inverted the time-arrow of the classical creationist dogma, with its rarely spelled out pessimistic implication that the life is moving from the highest biological organization to an entropic chaos. In its turn, the natural selection’s excessively contagious, “do-it-yourself” optimism might ultimately turn out to be its undoing : the natural selection conjecture, when transposed to such fields as linguistics from the strictly biological scene, with its times of engagement ranging from at most hundred years of life expectancy for an individual organism to at least millions and even billions of years for evolutionary processes to bring this or that organism to existence, becomes for the first time verifiable and even falsifiable. The present paper studies some implications of the well-known but almost universally disregarded tight combinatorial morphological-semantic structure of the verbal system of Biblical Hebrew, to show that this linguistic fossil testifies to the existence of a now extinct Proto-Language whose extremely tight verbal organization and meaningful architecture made it both structurally strikingly similar and expressively vastly superior to humanly designed Assembler languages, – an absolutely novel, paradoxical phenomenon, never before and nowhere else observed and apparently incompatible with the basic tenets of modern linguistic natural selection theories and, at the very least, crying out for new explanatory linguistic paradigms. (shrink)

The years following Israel’s founding were formative ones for the development of philosophy as an academic discipline in this country. During this period, the distinction between philosophy seen as contiguous with the humanities and social sciences, and philosophy seen as adjacent to the natural and exact sciences began to make its presence felt in the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. This distinction, which was manifest in the curriculum, was by no means unique to the Hebrew University, but reflected the (...) broader bifurcation between two schools of Western philosophy in the twentieth century. In English-speaking countries, it is generally referred to as the divide between analytic and continental philosophy. What was special about the situation at the Hebrew University, however, was that the split manifested itself in a rather small department, being embodied, basically, in one prominent representative of each school – Nathan Rotenstreich and Yehoshua Bar-Hillel. This article will focus on some key aspects of the lives and thought of Rotenstreich and Bar-Hillel. It will address their philosophical maturation as S.H. Bergmann’s students, their views on the goals of twentieth-century philosophy, on the philosopher’s role in public life, and the circumstances under which they started teaching in Jerusalem right after the founding of the State of Israel. (shrink)

In the age of web 2.0, the university is constantly challenged to re-adapt its ‘old-fashioned’ pedagogies to the new possibilities opened up by digital technologies. This article proposes a rethinking of the relation between university and (digital) technologies by focusing not on how technologies function in the university, but on their constituting a meta-condition for the existence of the university pedagogy of inquiry. Following Ivan Illich’s idea that textual technologies played a crucial role in the inception of the university, we (...) will first show the structural similarities between university thinking and the text as a profanation of the book. Secondly, we describe university thinking as a type of critical thinking based on the materiality of the text-on-the-page, explaining why the text has been at the centre of university pedagogy since the beginning. In the third part, we show how Illich came to see the end of the culture of the text as a challenge for the university, by describing the new features of the text-as-code incompatible with the idea of reading as study. Finally, we challenge this pessimistic reading of Illich’s and end with a call for a profanatory pedagogy of digital technologies that could mirror the revolutionary thinking behind the mediaeval invention of the text. (shrink)

Electronic text can be defined on two different, though interconnected, levels. On the one hand, electronic text can be defined by taking the notion of “text” or “printed text” as the point of departure. On the other hand, electronic text can be defined by taking the digital format as the point of departure, where everything is represented in the binary alphabet. While the notion of text in most cases lends itself to being independent of (...) medium and embodiment, it is also often tacitly assumed that it is in fact modeled on the print medium, instead of, for instance, on hand-written text or speech. In late 20th century, the notion of “text” was subjected to increasing criticism, as can be seen in the question that has been raised in literary text theory about whether “there is a text in this class.” At the same time, the notion was expanded by including extralinguistic sign modalities (images, videos). A basic question, therefore, is whether electronic text should be included in the enlarged notion that text is a new digital sign modality added to the repertoire of modalities or whether it should be included as a sign modality that is both an independent modality and a container that can hold other modalities. In the first case, the notion of electronic text would be paradigmatically formed around the e-book, which was conceived as a digital copy of a printed book but is now a deliberately closed work. Even closed works in digital form will need some sort of interface and hypertextual navigation that together constitute a particular kind of paratext needed for accessing any sort of digital material. In the second case, the electronic text is defined by the representation of content and (some parts of the) processing rules as binary sequences manifested in the binary alphabet. This wider notion would include, for instance, all sorts of scanning results, whether of the outer cosmos or the interior of our bodies and of digital traces of other processes in-between (machine readings included). Since other alphabets, such as the genetic alphabet and all sorts of images may also be represented in the binary alphabet, such materials will also belong to the textual universe within this definition. A more intriguing implication is that born-digital materials may also include scripts and interactive features as intrinsic parts of the text. The two notions define the text on different levels: one is centered on the Latin, the other on the binary alphabet, and both definitions include hypertext, interactivity, and multimodality as constituent parameters. In the first case, hypertext is included as a navigational, paratextual device; whereas in the second case, hypertext is also incorporated in the narrative within an otherwise closed work or as a constituent element on the textual universe of the web, where it serves the ongoing production of (possibly scripted) connections and disconnections between blocks of textual content. Since the early decades of early 21st century still represent only the very early stages of the globally distributed universe of web texts, this is also a history of the gradual unfolding of the dimensions of these three constituencies—hypertext, interactivity, and multimodality. The result is a still-expanding repertoire of genres, including some that are emerging via path dependency; some via remediation; and some as new genres that are unique for networked digital media, including “social media texts” and a growing variety of narrative and discursive multiple-source systems. (shrink)

The article examines the first Hebrew Encyclopedia of Science, Yesodei ha-Tvunah u-Migdal ha-Emunah, by Medieval Jewish scholar Abraham Bar Hiyya from Saragossa (Iberian peninsula).

Spinoza’s interpretation of the election of the Hebrews in the third chapter of the Theological Political Treatise enraged quite a few Jewish readers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The rise of nationalism, and the demand of loyalty to one’s own genos brought about a certain style of patriotic writing aimed at Spinoza’s “betrayal.” In a series of lectures on the eve of the Great War, Hermann Cohen portrayed Spinoza as a person of “demonic spirt” and as “the great enemy (...) who emerged from our midst.” In a stream of words more akin to shouting than to analytic discourse, Cohen protested against what he took to be the universal complacency regarding Spinoza’s treachery: “When Spinoza, with merciless severity, makes his own nation the object of contempt – at the time that Rembrandt lived on the same street and immortalized the ideal type of the Jew - no voice rises in protest against this humanly incomprehensible betrayal.” Cohen was right in identifying in Spinoza an absence of ethnic patriotism. I, for one, find this absence a virtue rather than a vice, and in this chapter I will argue, inter alia, that in rejecting ethnic normativity Spinoza was consistent with a dominant strand of rabbinic thought. What precisely was so offensive in Spinoza’s words in chapter three of the TTP? A common reading of this chapter suggests that Spinoza presents the election of the Hebrews as merely political and not spiritual in nature, thus downgrading the importance of the election. This reading is not absolutely groundless, but it is highly imprecise, for as we shall shortly see, for Spinoza, God’s (genuine) election of the Hebrews indicates the political weakness of their state, rather than its strength. Apart from pointing out this important corrective, I will also attempt in this essay to evaluate Spinoza’s critique of the election of the Hebrews, the result of which might lead us to some highly unexpected conclusions. In the first section of this chapter I present an outline of Spinoza’s interpretation of the connection between the Hebrews’ belief in being chosen, and the xenophobic nature of their ancient state. In the second section, I discuss Spinoza’s interpretation of the election of the Hebrews in chapter three of the TTP, and show that on Spinoza’s sardonic reading it was nothing but luck which allowed the Hebrew state to survive for a rather long time in spite of its poor political constitution. The third and final part provides a defense of Spinoza’s critique of the notion of chosenness. I will argue, first, that chosenness has never been granted the status of theological doctrine or principle of faith within rabbinic Judaism. I will then point out the significant religious problems with the notion of chosenness, suggesting however two exceptions in which belief in chosenness might still be defensible. I will conclude this section with a discussion of rabbinic views on the conversion of minors, arguing that according to the mainstream rabbinic view, being a Jew is a merit only on the condition that a person is pious, a view which is not far from Spinoza’s own claims in the third chapter of the TTP. (shrink)

A review of Galit Wellner's translation (to Hebrew) of Don Ihde's (2009) "Postphenomenology and Technoscience".

This chapter discusses several possible reasons why works by women philosophers have traveled significantly less than those written by men, although women’s contributions go back to the start of European history of philosophy. Differentiating between geographic, linguistic, historic and philosophical travels, Tove Pettersen claims that gender is particularly significant with regard to historical and philosophical traveling. As the case of women philosophers clearly demonstrate, gender hampers the circulation of certain texts and inhibit transhistorical exchange of knowledge and ideas. ****** Che (...) chapitre examine plusieurs raisons possibles pour expliquer pourquoi les œuvres de femmes philosophes ont “voyage” beaucoup moins que celle des hommes, bien que la contribution des femmes remonte au début de l´histoire européenne de la philosophie. Distinguant entre plusieurs façons de voyager – géographique, linguistique, historique et philosophique –, Tove Pettersen soutient que le “genre” est un facteur particulièrement significative par rapport au voyage historique et philosophique- Comme le démontre clairement le cas des femmes philosophes, leur genre nuit á la circulation de certains textes ainsi qu’à l’échange transnational du savoir et des idées. (shrink)

Over the last two years, the third wave of artificial intelligence (AI) has emerged powerful tools for both artistic expression and scientific research. In design, image generators display an equivalent disruption to text generators, while the medium of text creates the new scope of writing prompts. This contribution discusses the ambivalences between text and image generators via two main theses: first about the potential of prompting and generated images as a medium of discourse; second, it examines the (...) reasoning behind their tendency to be mystified. Prompts can be automated through text generators and used to generate images on a wider scale, making it a praxis in which precise wording becomes crucial for generating anything. Generated images practice a form of mimesis. With Generative Adversial Networks (GANs) producing non-referential images, the discourse of illustration is concerning the obsolescence of authorship. AI is observed to manifest a dual character, serving as both tool and author, even though AI does not own the classification of a person and is not an author in legal terms. The utilization of text and image generators is intertwined with a mythicized notion due to their non-verifiable mode of operation. The myth of AI is a product of its indeterminacy. (shrink)

These two essays (minuscule acts of reading the Bible) by a Hindu, is a nascent praxis of theology. They have been privately circulated and now I am putting them up.

A Hebrew translation of William James's essay "Reflex Action and Theism", The Will to Believe and other essays in Popular Philosophy (1897): 111-144.

The physical properties of time point to extra-temporal causality; this research abstract compiles the key findings in Hebrew.

This article interrogates a certain philosophical scene – one which constitutes itself through the position of what Jacques Derrida calls “the ethical instance of violence.” This scene supposes a certain “style” of writing or doing philosophy, and perhaps even a certain philosophical “genre” or “subgenre”: the philosophical discourse on violence. In the course of the essay, I analyze this quasi-juridical scene through readings of Aristotle, Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Judith Butler, Slavoj Žižek, Werner Hamacher, Rodolphe Gasché, and Martin Hägglund among (...) others. The scene, built on texts on texts on violence, demands a logic of purity; it is wary of contaminations and equivocations. And yet it thrives on them. In analyzing the implications of text, writing, and trace for the philosophical discourse on violence, I follow Derrida “just to see” what could make the scene tremble. (shrink)

In this dialogue, I illustrate why moral arguments from analogy are a valuable part of moral reasoning by considering how texting while driving is, morally speaking, no different than drunk driving.

This paper explores the hypothesis that proper names serve as anchors identifying the individuals in the possible or real world. This hypothesis is tested on Old Icelandic narratives. A prominent feature of Old Icelandic sagas is that the narrative matter is not quite new. A Saga is reliable iff it refers to the events relevant for its audience and accepted as true by the whole community. I argue that proper names must be regarded as references to the background knowledge of (...) the medieval audience. I follow two contemporary Sagas based on the fresh events and show that proper names in a Saga mind were arranged in form of a database, each type of a personal designation having its charachteristic text-building profile. The form of the name and its frequency in the Saga are linked with the rank of the character. The high number of people mentioned in the Sagas is explained by the fact that the Sagas aimed at describing the real world, where the names of the individuals and the events they were involved cross-identified each other. Every character had its rigid identifiers. The total amount of propria is always higher than the number of active figures. I classify the Saga characters into five ranks and discuss their information-structural profiles. (shrink)

Biblical Hebrew, BH, could be seen as primarily a verbal language [1], with an average verse of the Hebrew Bible containing no less than three verbs and with the biggest part of its vocabulary representing morphological derivations from verbal roots, almost entirely triliteral, or triconsonantal, – the feature BH shares with all Semitic and a few other Afro- Asiatic languages. The unique peculiarity of this triconsonantal morphological pervasiveness did not completely escape the attention of previous generations of Western (...) linguists, as shows the following “methodological” warning opening a popular Hebrew grammar edited more than a century ago: «The roots, whatever may have been their original form, are in the Old Testament almost entirely triliteral, ... thus imposing upon the memory a very heavy strain. ... Every verb has to be learned separately; the verbs to go out, to go up, to go down are quite different, having nothing in common with one another and being quite unrelated to the verb to go.» This amusing résumé has the merit to recognize, even if under the guise of an earnestly banal pedagogical clueing in, two extraordinary fundamental linguistic phenomena common to all Semitic languages, the very objects of the present study. (shrink)

In November 2022, OpenAI released ChatGPT, an incredibly sophisticated chatbot. Its capability is astonishing: as well as conversing with human interlocutors, it can answer questions about history, explain almost anything you might think to ask it, and write poetry. This level of achievement has provoked interest in questions about whether a chatbot might have something similar to human intelligence or even consciousness. Given that the function of a chatbot is to process linguistic input and produce linguistic output, we consider the (...) question whether a sophisticated chatbot might have inner speech. That is: Might it talk to itself, internally? We explored this via a conversation with ‘Playground’, a chatbot which is very similar to ChatGPT but more flexible in certain respects. We asked it questions which, plausibly, can only be answered if one first produces some inner speech. Here, we present our findings and discuss their philosophical significance. (shrink)

It is suggested that the impetus to generate models is probably the most fundamental point of connection between mysticism and psychology. In their concern with the relation between ‘unseen’ realms and the ‘seen’, mystical maps parallel cognitive models of the relation between ‘unconscious’ and ‘conscious’ processes. The map or model constitutes an explanation employing terms current within the respective canon. The case of language mysticism is examined to illustrate the premise that cognitive models may benefit from an understanding of the (...) kinds of experiences gained, and explanatory concepts advanced, within mystical traditions. Language mysticism is of particular interest on account of the central role thought to be played by language in relation to self and the individual's construction of reality. The discussion focuses on traditions of language mysticism within Judaism, in which emphasis is placed on the deconstruction of language into primary elements and the overarching significance of the divine Name. Analysis of the detailed techniques used suggests ways in which multiple associations to any given word/concept were consciously explored in an altered state. It appears that these mystics were consciously engaging with what are normally preconscious cognitive processes, whereby schematic associations to sensory images or thoughts are activated. The testimony from their writings implies that these mystics experienced distortions of the sense of self , which may suggest that, in the normal state, ‘I’ is constructed in relation to the preconscious system of associations. Moreover, an important feature of Hebrew language mysticism is its emphasis on embodiment -- specific associations were deemed to exist between the letters and each structure of the body. Implications, first, for the relationship between language and self, and, second, for the role of embodiment in relation to self are discussed. The importance of the continual emphasis on the Name of God throughout the linguistic practices may have provided a means for effectively replacing the cognitive indexing function hypothesized here to be normally played by ‘I’ with a more transpersonal cognitive index, especially in relation to memory. (shrink)

Der Aufsatz befasst sich mit der Lektüre philosophischer Texte im Latein- und Griechischunterricht. Er diskutiert Kriterien der Themen- und Textauswahl; erörtert Möglichkeiten der Motivierung der Schüler zur aktiven Auseinandersetzung mit philosophischen Themen und Texten sowie die Möglichkeit der Behandlung philosophischer Themen und Texte bereits in der Lehrbuchphase.

The base texts of most of the philosophical systems of ancient India are in the form of a collection of aphorisms (sūtra-s). The aphorisms are so brief and tersely worded that their significance can seldom be understood without the help of a commentary or commentaries. Sometimes, the literal meaning of an aphorism needs to be qualified or modified by an explanation found in the commentary. If a reader relies exclusively on the literal meaning of the aphorisms in the base (...) class='Hi'>text without having recourse to any commentary or disregards all commentaries, he or she may miss the point. Contrariwise, if a reader relies exclusively on a commentary and disregards the literal meaning of an aphorism, he or she will commit another kind of blunder. Ideally, equal attention should be paid to the base text as well as the commentary or commentaries. Even then, all problems are not automatically solved, for it is an uphill task to decide when to go by the literal meaning of the aphorisms and when to follow the commentary. In their polemics against the Cārvāka/Lokāyata, Jayantabhaṭṭa (c. ninth century C.E.) and Hemacandra (eleventh century C.E.) erred because they did not follow the golden rule stated above and consequently misunderstood and misrepresented their opponents’ contentions. (shrink)

Domestic courts have attained prominent status in the international human rights system. While adjudicating individual claims and interpreting legal provisions, domestic courts have conveyed meanings that are integral to the working of the international human rights system. The dynamism of domestic courts is an undeniable quality, through which they incorporate diverse perspectives based on principles linked to individual sovereignty, justice, peace, etc. In this paper, the role of the Indian Supreme Court has been discussed in light of three landmark decisions (...) where the court applies international and domestic human rights standards to substantiate its interpretations. In light of the cases of Navtej Singh v. Union of India, Joseph Shine v. Union of India, and KS Puttaswamy v. Union of India, the paper examines the approach of the court under five broad headings: (a) the domestic context, (b) autonomy and determination, (c) constitutional parameters and validity of laws (d) vulnerability, and (e) other courts and other contexts. On the role of domestic courts in general, the paper outlines a list of the contributions that domestic courts are making in the field of human rights.]. (shrink)

Domestic courts have attained prominent status in the international human rights system. While adjudicating individual claims and interpreting legal provisions, domestic courts have conveyed meanings that are integral to the working of the international human rights system. The dynamism of domestic courts is an undeniable quality, through which they incorporate diverse perspectives based on principles linked to individual sovereignty, justice, peace, etc. In this paper, the role of the Indian Supreme Court has been discussed in light of three landmark decisions (...) where the court applies international and domestic human rights standards to substantiate its interpretations. In light of the cases of Navtej Singh v. Union of India, Joseph Shine v. Union of India, and KS Puttaswamy v. Union of India, the paper examines the approach of the court under five broad headings: (a) the domestic context, (b) autonomy and determination, (c) constitutional parameters and validity of laws (d) vulnerability, and (e) other courts and other contexts. On the role of domestic courts in general, the paper outlines a list of the contributions that domestic courts are making in the field of human rights. (shrink)

What would a Jewish process theology look like if it also adopted the a priori principles of rabbinic Judaism - among them, the authority of Torah given on Sinai, an historically particular revelation of divine instruction for a particular people, and the authority of the Oral Torah, an historically evolving hermeneutic, according to which that revelation becomes normative practice for communities of observant Jews? I trust this would not be a naturalism, since it would be a theology that found its (...) grammar or regulative logic in a textual hermeneutic rather than in an account of the orders of perception and imagination. It would not, for the same token, be an anti-naturalism, but rather a theology for which the distinction between natural and super- or non-natural was not definitional. For such a theology, for example, the world out there would belong to the order of creation (maaseh bereshit), rather than to "nature." This would mean that, since God creates through words, language (at least some sort of language) and world would be intimately connected rather than extrinsic phenomena, It would mean, furthermore, that for language to "know" the world would not be surprising and that something like a form of realism would not be out of the question, While it would presuppose the authority of divine speech and even of some human interpretations of it, this other-than natural theology would not, as naturalists might suppose, present a heteronomous conception of divine law, If the distinction nature/not nature would not be definitive for this theology, neither would those of autonomy/heteronomy, body/spirit, this world/other world, This theology would present its own variety of neutral monism; in this case, however, the undifferentiated plenum would be termed a plenum of undifferentiated signification (or pure semiosis), of which undifferentiated feeling (or pure experience) was an instance; "prehension" would be another term for interpretation, Max Kadushin was the first and, as far as I know, the only Jewish thinker to articulate a process theology in the service of what he considered the behavioral or halakhic authority of classical rabbinic literature. In this paper, I examine Kadushin's work as the foundation of a rabbinic text process theology, I assume, from the outset, that such a theology may complement a Jewish natural process theology and that a Jewish process theology, in general, would appear as a process of dialogue between textual- andnatural-process theologies. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to explore a recent hypothesis about what the main mss. are for establishing the text of Aristotle’s Ethica Nicomachea (henceforth EN). This hypothesis was recently advanced on the basis of evidence coming from EN I-II. In exploring this hypothesis, I confine myself to the text of EN X.6-9 [=Bywater X.6-8], and, as a result, I propose a new text for EN X.6-9 [=Bywater X.6-8] based on a fresh collation of nine mss—four of (...) which were not taken into account in previous editions of the EN—and based on readings that can be gathered from the Arabic translation of the EN that was preserved in the Fez ms. The text proposed in this paper is accompanied by textual notes that justify my decisions regarding some difficult passages. (shrink)

A recent systematic review of Machine Learning (ML) approaches to health data, containing over 100 studies, found that the most investigated problem was mental health (Yin et al., 2019). Relatedly, recent estimates suggest that between 165,000 and 325,000 health and wellness apps are now commercially available, with over 10,000 of those designed specifically for mental health (Carlo et al., 2019). In light of these trends, the present chapter has three aims: (1) provide an informative overview of some of the recent (...) work taking place at the intersection of text mining and mental health so that we can (2) highlight and analyze several pressing ethical issues that are arising in this rapidly growing field and (3) suggest productive directions for how these issues might be better addressed within future interdisciplinary work to ensure the responsible development of text mining approaches in psychology generally, and in mental health fields, specifically. In Section 1, we review some of the recent literature on text-mining and mental health in the contexts of traditional experimental settings, social media, and research involving electronic health records. Then, in Section 2, we introduce and discuss ethical concerns that arise before, during, and after research is conducted. Finally, in Section 3, we offer several suggestions about how ethical oversight of text-mining research might be improved to be more responsive to the concerns mapped out in Section 2. (shrink)

This paper focuses on the hermeneutic of reading text and hearing text.

This volume contains more than 60 original translations of papers written by the German philosopher Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1646-1716). As well as contributing to Leibniz scholarship, it is intended to function as an introductory text for students.