A well-known objection to prioritarianism, famously levelled by Mike Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve, is that it wrongly ignores the unity of the individual in treating intra-personal cases like inter-personal cases. In this paper we accept that there should be a moral shift between these cases, but argue that this is because autonomy is a relevant consideration in intra-personal but not inter-personal cases, and one to which pluralist prioritarians ought to attend. To avoid this response, Otsuka and Voorhoeve must assume we (...) know nothing about the subjective information of the person being chosen for. But we show that this commits them to two controversial assumptions: that welfare consists in an objective list of goods, and – if one accepts an unorthodox but plausible account of the relationship between risk aversion and rationality – that there is only a narrow range of rational risk aversions. Only prioritarians who accept both these assumptions are on the hook of Otsuka and Voorhoeve’s objection; for all others, the examples have insufficient information, and so lose their sting. (shrink)

The adversarial legal system is traditionally praised for its normative appeal: it protects individual rights; ensures an equal, impartial, and consistent application of the law; and, most importantly, its competitive structure facilitates the discovery of truth – both in terms of the facts, and in terms of the correct interpretation of the law. At the same time, legal representation is allocated as a commodity, bought and sold in the market: the more one pays, the better legal representation one gets. In (...) this article, I argue that the integration of a market in legal representation with the adversarial system undercuts the very normative justifications on which the system is based. Furthermore, I argue that there are two implicit conditions, which are currently unmet, but are required for the standard justifications to hold: that there is (equal opportunity for) equality of legal representation between parties, and that each party has (equal opportunity for) a sufficient level of legal representation. I, therefore, outline an ideal proposal for reform that would satisfy these conditions. (shrink)

I offer a novel distinction between two concepts of competition. The first, parallel competition, is designed to create separate pathways for each competitor wherein they can maximize their performance. The second, friction competition, is designed to facilitate a clash between competitors. Each concept is utilized as an institutional mechanism to generate social benefits. In parallel competition, the social benefit is the result of the aggregation of the independent efforts of each competitor. In friction competition, it emerges from the clash between (...) competitors. I argue that this distinction carries significant normative implications concerning debates over equality, freedom, and democratic institutional design. (shrink)

Despite being largely overlooked in the literature, Israel provides a rare example of what a full decade of twenty-first century populism in power looks like. Based on an examination of rhetoric and policymaking between 2009 and 2019, this article brings the writing on the subject up to date and highlights the unique traits of Israeli populism. In so doing it establishes that Israeli populism has been mainstreamed to a remarkable extent and currently encompasses almost all right-wing parties in the country’s (...) legislature. Moreover, it shows that the Israeli case embodies a variety of populism which has yet to be acknowledged in the literature – neither economic nor cultural in character, but rather based on national security issues. The concept of ‘security-driven populism’, introduced here, could prove useful to researchers studying other populist regimes that do not fit neatly into the ‘culture versus economy’ debate, which has dominated the field for years. (shrink)

Thomas Jefferson’s famous proposal; whereby a state’s constitution should be re-enacted every 19 years by a majority vote; purports to solve the intergenerational problem caused by perpetual constitutions: namely that laws which were enacted by people who are already dead bind living citizens without their consent. I argue that the model fails to fulfil its own normative consent-based aspirations. This is because it produces two groups of people who will end up living under laws to which they did not give (...) their consent: citizens who reach the voting age after the re-enactment process; citizens who did not assent to being obliged by the majority vote’s results. I reject possible responses to my argument by showing that they result in making the model either impractical or redundant. The remainder of the paper discusses whether implementing the model would enhance the consent-based legitimacy of the modern state. (shrink)

The strangeness of modern physics has sparked several popular books--such as The Tao of Physics--that explore its affinity with Eastern mysticism. But the founders of quantum mechanics were educated in the classical traditions of Western civilization and Western philosophy. In Nature Loves to Hide, physicist Shimon Malin takes readers on a fascinating tour of quantum theory--one that turns to Western philosophical thought to clarify this strange yet inescapable explanation of reality. Malin translates quantum mechanics into plain English, explaining its (...) origins and workings against the backdrop of the famous debate between Niels Bohr and the skeptical Albert Einstein. Then he moves on to build a philosophical framework that can account for the quantum nature of reality. He shows, for instance, how Platonic and Neoplatonic thought resonates with quantum theory. He draws out the linkage between the concepts of Neoplatonism and the more recent process philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. The universe, Whitehead wrote, is an organic whole, composed not of lifeless objects, but "elementary experiences." Beginning with Whitehead's insight, Malin shows how this concept of "throbs of experience" expresses quantum reality, with its subatomic uncertainties, its constituents that are waves and also particles, its emphasis on acts of measurement. Once any educated person could explain the universe as a vast Newtonian web of cause and effect, but since quantum theory, reality again appears to be richer and more mysterious than we had thought. Writing with broad humanistic insight and deep knowledge of science, and using delightful conversations with fictional astronauts Peter and Julie to explain more difficult concepts, Shimon Malin offers a profound new understanding of the nature of reality--one that shows a deep continuity with aspects of our Western philosophical tradition going back 2500 years, and that feels more deeply satisfying, and truer, than the clockwork universe of Newton. (shrink)

La primera parte de este libro expone la idea o teoría de las Leyes Noájicas, desde perspectivas espirituales, filosóficas, psicológicas, sociales y políticas. Varios de sus contenidos ya han sido presentados a líderes, incluidos estadistas internacionales (cuyas cartas se incluyen aquí), que han respondido con ánimo a su estudio y difusión. La segunda parte del libro presenta la conducta o práctica concreta de las Leyes Noájicas. Esta tarea precisa procede de una extensa investigación acerca de la Tradición del comentario sobre (...) la Revelación en el Sinaí, de la cual forman parte las Leyes de Noé (que ya anteriormente eran el pacto moral de la humanidad, pero que fueron reexpresadas con autoridad en el Sinaí). La forma en que las Leyes de Noé con sus detalles estructuran la conducta ética de los principales dominios de la existencia humana se establece claramente para el lector general; y con extensas notas a pie de página y referencias para aquellos que buscan profundizar el estudio. (shrink)

Central to contemporary cognitive science is the notion that mental processes involve computations defined over internal representations. This view stands in sharp contrast to the to visual perception and cognition, whose most prominent proponent has been J.J. Gibson. In the direct theory, perception does not involve computations of any sort; it is the result of the direct pickup of available information. The publication of Gibson's recent book (Gibson 1979) offers an opportunity to examine his approach, and, more generally, to contrast (...) the theory of direct perception with the computational/representational view. In the first part of the present article (Sections 2direct perceptioncase study”: the problem of perceiving the three-dimensional shape of moving objects is examined. This problem, which has been extensively studied within the immediate perception framework, serves to illustrate some of the inherent shortcomings of that approach. Finally, in Section 5, an attempt is made to place the theory of direct perception in perspective by embedding it in a more comprehensive framework. (shrink)

This study introduces the concept of deviant behavior in a moderated-mediation framework of incentives and organizational justice perception. The proposed relationships in the theoretical framework were tested with a sample of 311 academics, using simple random sampling, via causal models and structural equation modeling. The findings suggest that incentives might boost the apparent performance, but not necessarily the intended performance. The results confirm that employees’ affection for incentives has direct, indirect, and conditional indirect effects on their deviant behavior likelihood. The (...) relationship between employee deviant behavior likelihood and affection for incentives was moderated by organizational justice perception and partially mediated by reward expectancy, thus having significant contributions toward the extant literature of deviant behavior and incentives. The findings have important implications for managers, academicians, and policy makers for mitigating adverse behavior in professional employees through proper use of incentives. (shrink)

The editors welcome letters from readers, although we cannot guarantee that all will be published. To ensure timeliness, correspondents must respond to an article within seven weeks, and not exceed two double‐spaced pages. Letters become the property of the editors and may be edited and shortened at our discretion.

In this historical essay, we examine the reciprocal influences of philosophical doctrines and logic, their interrelations with language, and the place of mathematics in these developments.

Name der Zeitschrift: Naharaim Jahrgang: 8 Heft: 2 Seiten: 253-272.

The texts of Walid Daka, a Palestinian political prisoner incarcerated since 1986, challenge the notion that colonial power ends with decolonization and expose the shortcomings of examining colonial prisons solely through the eliminatory prism of death and deprivation. Studying Daka’s texts, the article presents how the Israeli carceral system has managed to utilize prisoners’ hopes and longings – in their relations with one another, their political actions such as hunger strikes or their building of internal leadership hierarchies, and their affective (...) worlds – to further its own goals. Rather than a pessimistic account, this article critically analyzes Daka’s writings to demonstrate how a first-person study of carceral subjectification can unfold within an activist framework. Daka uses these observations to develop an alternative articulation of decolonization that I term ‘abolitionist decolonization’ as a collective and continued insistence on setting the terms of getting free. By ‘abolitionist decolonization,’ I conjure a difficult conversation between a Fanonian project of never-ending decolonization and a Foucauldian project of never-ending abolition. As such, this critical attitude aims to counter settler-colonial carcerality in ways that will foil the administration’s attempts to reproduce the dangers that the prisoners seek to elude, through the very means they deploy to elude them. (shrink)

Constellations, Volume 29, Issue 3, Page 343-358, September 2022.

Moral Entanglements: Conserving Birds in Britain and Germany, by Stefan Bargheer, claims that work and play orientations have respectively organized German and British wild bird conservation efforts. The book argues that work and play are nonmoral categories, and—more broadly—that moral justifications for action should be understood as mere post-hoc surface phenomena that contribute little to social action. The new French pragmatic sociology provides conceptual tools to examine how categories like work and play intertwine with logics of moral evaluation that define (...) what activities rightly qualify as each category, what public goods might each yield, and what value ought to be attached to them. With this approach in mind, this review examines Moral Entanglements’ claims, and identifies ways in which moral logics did indeed play a role in establishing different bird conservation styles in each country. The review highlights the broader importance for comparative-historical sociologists to take moral repertoires into account as they reconstruct historical institutional emergence. (shrink)

Given a weakly o-minimal structure${\cal M}$and its o-minimal completion$\bar{{\cal M}}$, we first associate to$\bar{{\cal M}}$a canonical language and then prove thatTh$\left$determines$Th\left$. We then investigate the theory of the pair$\left$in the spirit of the theory of dense pairs of o-minimal structures, and prove, among other results, that it is near model complete, and every definable open subset of${\bar{M}^n}$is already definable in$\bar{{\cal M}}$.We give an example of a weakly o-minimal structure interpreting$\bar{{\cal M}}$and show that it is not elementarily equivalent to any reduct (...) of an o-minimal trace. (shrink)

Ordinary mathematical proofs—to be distinguished from formal derivations—are the locus of mathematical knowledge. Their epistemic content goes way beyond what is summarised in the form of theorems. Objections are raised against the formalist thesis that every mainstream informal proof can be formalised in some first-order formal system. Foundationalism is at the heart of Hilbert's program and calls for methods of formal logic to prove consistency. On the other hand, ‘systemic cohesiveness’, as proposed here, seeks to explicate why mathematical knowledge is (...) coherent (in an informal sense) and places the problem of reliability within the province of the philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

This study evaluated the potential contribution of extrageniculate visual pathways to oculomotor orienting reflexes in hemianopic patients. It tested whether extrageniculate pathways mediate inhibition of return —a phenomenon characterized by slowed target detections at recently stimulated locations . Because hemianopic subjects cannot overtly respond to stimuli presented within their hemianopic field, we utilized a spatial cueing paradigm that capitalized on the fact that IOR operates in spatiotopic coordinates. Subjects moved their eyes so that a cue and a target presented at (...) the same spatial location were imaged successively onto blind and seeing portions of their retinas. One hemianopic patient showed a similar IOR effect from cues presented within both the seeing and the hemianopic fields. With a second hemianopic patient, only presentations of the cue to the subject's seeing field produced IOR. The explanation for this discrepancy is not evident. These observations highlight both the potential value and the pitfalls inherent in using “blindsight” as a window into human consciousness. (shrink)

Recent years have seen numerous sociological disagreements devolve into heated debates, with scholars openly accusing their peers of being both empirically wrong and morally misguided. While social scientists routinely reflect on the ethical implications of certain research assumptions and data collection methods, the sociology of knowledge production has said little about how moral debates over scholarship shape subsequent research trajectories. Drawing on the new French pragmatic sociology, this article examines how sociologists respond to criticisms of the moral worth of their (...) research. The article outlines three typical responses: (1) accepting the criticism and changing direction completely; (2) accepting the criticism but changing discursive framing to incorporate existing research without being subject to critique; and (3) navigating through the debate by devising new research directions that do not trigger such criticism. To demonstrate, the article looks at how sociologists of religion responded, in their published scholarship, to criticisms of secularization theory as depreciating religious people and spiritual experience. Across the responses, we show that sociologists have included moral considerations in their empirical investigations, and have switched among several diverse moral justifications to address—and also avoid—criticism. We conclude by demonstrating that this model can be extended to other domains of sociological inquiry, including the study of gender-based wage inequality and methodological nationalism. The article highlights the importance of mapping the moral frameworks sociologists use for the sociology of knowledge and the sociology of morality. (shrink)

Abstract. Darwinism has attracted proportionately less attention from Jewish thinkers than from Christian thinkers. One significant reason for the disparity is that the theodicies created by Jews to contend with the catastrophes which punctuated Jewish history are equally suited to address the massive extinctions which characterize natural history. Theologies of divine hiddenness, restraint, and radical immanence, coming together in the sixteenth-century mystical cosmogony of Isaac Luria, have been rehabilitated and reworked by modern Jewish thinkers in the post-Darwin era.

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a prolific scholar, impassioned theologian, and prominent activist who participated in the black civil rights movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. He has been hailed as a hero, honored as a visionary, and endlessly quoted as a devotional writer. In this sympathetic, yet critical, examination, Shai Held elicits the overarching themes and unity of Heschel’s incisive and insightful thought. Focusing on the idea of transcendence—or the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness—Held puts Heschel into (...) dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, Christian theologians, devotional writers, and philosophers of religion. (shrink)

Photographers John Shimon and Julie Lindemann use antique cameras, modern lens technology, artificial light, and contemporary pop culture to create portraits of the people in their native state amidst backyards, living rooms, parking lots, and the landscape of Wisconsin. These recent photographs are juxtaposed with portraits from the Milwaukee Art Museum’s permanent collections, including daguerreotype portraits, ambrotypes, and tintypes of anonymous people taken by nineteenth-century photographers, as well with photographs by such well-known artists as Alfred Stieglitz, Sally Mann, Larry (...) Clark, Walker Evans, Nan Goldin, Eugene von Beuenchenhein, and Francis Ford. The pairings of new and old illustrate the legacy of portraiture and the significance of “posing” before the lens, and each image is enriched by its proximity to another, unmasking sitter, photographer, and viewer. Unmasked & Anonymous: Shimon & Lindemann Consider Portraiture includes more than sixty color and black-and-white photographs plus essays by Shimon, Lindemann, and Milwaukee Art Museum curator Lisa Hostetler. (shrink)

In a recent article, Azzouni has argued in favor of a version of formalism according to which ordinary mathematical proofs indicate mechanically checkable derivations. This is taken to account for the quasi-universal agreement among mathematicians on the validity of their proofs. Here, the author subjects these claims to a critical examination, recalls the technical details about formalization and mechanical checking of proofs, and illustrates the main argument with aanalysis of examples. In the author's view, much of mathematical reasoning presents genuine (...) meaning-dependent mathematical characteristics that cannot be captured by formal calculi. ‘…there is a conflict between mathematical practice and the formalist doctrine.’ [Kreisel, 1969, p. 39]. (shrink)

Abraham Joshua Heschel was a prolific scholar, impassioned theologian, and prominent activist who participated in the black civil rights movement and the campaign against the Vietnam War. He has been hailed as a hero, honored as a visionary, and endlessly quoted as a devotional writer. In this sympathetic, yet critical, examination, Shai Held elicits the overarching themes and unity of Heschel’s incisive and insightful thought. Focusing on the idea of transcendence—or the movement from self-centeredness to God-centeredness—Held puts Heschel into (...) dialogue with contemporary Jewish thinkers, Christian theologians, devotional writers, and philosophers of religion. (shrink)

Following participation in Dr. Yair Caspi’s “Psychology in Judaism” workshop, the writers contemplate whether the teaching of Caspi’s model in academic settings could become simultaneously a fresh addition to interdisciplinary approaches to the teaching of Judaism in Israeli Academic life, and an academic addition to the contemporary trend to Jewish renewal in Israeli society. The model is based on weekly facilitated workshops in which participants both reflect on and discuss their lives and also explore unique interpretations of Jewish texts and (...) ideas, constantly seeking the borderline where their lives inform the text and vice versa. The process leads to the re-enchantment of ancient Jewish concepts, the reinvention of the Jewish religious experience in a contemporary paradigm and idiom, and the possibility of deep transformative insight. (shrink)

'Small businesses do not have the depth to sustain mistakes and losses in the way that large businesses can. It is the view of the management of MacLine that an ethical approach to business is one of the key factors in ensuring the long term survival of the business.’Dr Yehuda Baruch is Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for Organisational Research, London Business School, Sussex Place, Regent's Park, London NW1 4SA; and Mr Mark Lewis is Managing Director of MacLine. (...) Teachers interested in having a package of teaching notes and transparencies relevant to this case may contact Dr Baruch at the above address. (shrink)

The Kuzari: In Defense of the Despised Faith is the first new translation into English of The Kuzari since 1905, annotated and explained based on the classic commentaries. Written by Rabbi Yehuda HaLevi of Spain over a period of twenty years and completed in 1140, The Kuzari has enthralled generations of Jews and non-Jews alike with its clear-cut presentation on Judaism, and its polemics against Greek philosophy, Christianity, Islam, and Karaism.

Fichte claims in Section 5 of the Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre (GWL) that the absolute I contains a difference between two directions. In this paper, I argue that this specific claim complements, rather than contradicts, his general position in Section 1, according to which the absolute I is a simple identity or a point. I first show that we can identify a version of what I call Fichte’s Two-Directions Theory in texts written both before and after the GWL. I term (...) this version his Two-Series Theory. Drawing on this reading, I demonstrate, in contrast to previous research, that Fichte consistently formulates the absolute I in a twofold manner: as a pure act that precedes any difference and as a proposition that contains a relation. I further argue that Fichte’s treatment of the absolute I as a simple unity and as a unity of two directions maps onto two stages within his philosophical investigation. On my account, Fichte seeks to comprehend the absolute I by considering the I’s activity both as it is in itself and as it presents itself to thought. (shrink)

A unique solution is proposed to the problem of how thermodynamic processes between thermodynamic systems at relative rest “appear” to a moving observer. Assuming only transformations for entropy, pressure, and volume and the invariance of the “fundamental thermodynamic equation,” one can derive transformations for (thermodynamic) energy and temperature. The invariance of the first and second laws entails transformations for work and heat. All thermodynamic relations become Lorentz-invariant. The transformations thus derived are in principle equivalent to those of Einstein and Planck, (...) except that our expressions for energy and work do not include the mass motion energy. This results in a simpler formulation and endows our transformations (especially that of temperature) with a straightforward physical interpretation. (shrink)