Plato and Aristotle on the vocation of the philosopher -- Halevi's Kuzari as a platonic dialogue -- Maimonides and the imagination -- Elia del Medigo, Averroes and Averroism -- Paduan Averroism reconsidered -- Philosophy and mysticism -- Maimonides and Spinoza on good and evil -- A note on natural right, nature and reason in Spinoza -- Spinoza and Luzzatto : philosophy and religion -- On the interpretation of Maimonides: the cases of Samuel David Luzzatto and Ahad Haxam -- Harry a. (...) Wolfson as interpreter of medieval thought -- On the limitations of human knowledge. (shrink)

Understanding “what something is” has long occupied philosophers, and no Western thinker has had more influence on the nature of being than Aristotle. Focusing on a reinterpretation of the concept of energeia as “activity,” Aryeh Kosman reexamines Aristotle’s ontology and some of our most basic assumptions about the great philosopher’s thought.

In Heraclitus and Thales’ Conceptual Scheme: A Historical Study Aryeh Finkelberg rejects the teleological interpretation of early Greek thought as targeted at later results, viz. philosophy, and seeks to determine its intended meaning by restoring it to its historical context.

Exploring what two foundational figures, Plato and Aristotle, have to say about the nature of human awareness and understanding, Aryeh Kosman concludes that ultimately the virtues of thought are to be found in the joys and satisfactions that come from thinking philosophically, whether we engage in it ourselves or witness others' participation.

In The Hasidic Moses, Aryeh Wineman invites readers to join him on a journey through various eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Hasidic texts that interpret the life of Moses. Such texts read their own accent on spirituality and innerness along with their conceptions of community and spiritual leadership into the biblical account of Moses. Wineman reveals the ways in which historical Hasidic voices interpreted both the Exodus from Egypt and the scene of Revelation at Sinai as statements concerning what occurs constantly (...) in our lives at all times. In addition, Wineman shows how Hasidic readers embraced the idea that Moses had to die in order that his soul might return to the world in the righteous and holy ones of every generation, and that the presence of Moses actually transcends time and is present in spiritual understanding as it unfolds at any moment in any period. ""Aryeh Wineman has written a clear and accessible book that serves as a delightful entry into the world of Hasidic thought. Using the template of Hasidic interpretations of the life of Moses, he takes the reader carefully through a broad range of Hasidic works, highlighting the Hasidic resistance to the plain meaning of scripture, opting instead for their penchant for devotional and spiritually deepening readings... The impulse toward spiritualizing both deepens the original text of the Torah and transcends it, stimulating the reader to read the Torah as an edifying document, rather than primarily a historical, legal, or even national work."" --Joel Hecker, Reconstructionist Rabbinical College ""Aryeh Wineman's The Hasidic Moses is a triumph on every level... The figure of Moses is brought alive in the words of the classic Hasidic masters and is made available for a new generation of spiritual seekers hungry to find meaning in biblical models and mystical texts. The Bible tells us that no one knows where Moses is buried--but we can say that he lives robustly in Aryeh Wineman's sparking new book!"" --Nehemia Polen, Hebrew College, Newton Centre, Massachusetts ""Aryeh Wineman writes authoritatively as the scholar he is, but addresses himself--like the rabbi he also is--not to other scholars, but to readers and seekers who would like to understand. In this way he lives the humility of the teacher Moses and leads us through his writing into the depths of the Hasidic homily and parable... For those of us who don't have direct access to the hasidic texts he translates, his gentle and careful presentation of The Hasidic Moses is a gift from soul to soul."" --Rodger Kamenetz, author of The Jew in the Lotus and Burnt Books Aryeh Wineman has written many studies in the area of Hebrew literature and Jewish mysticism. (shrink)

Clinical assessments of mental capacity have long been guided by four basic cognitive criteria (understanding, appreciation, ability to reason, communication of decision), distilled directly from widespread legal precedent in common law cases of informed consent and refusal. This article will challenge the sufficiency of these legal criteria at the bedside on the assertion that clinicians and bioethicists who evaluate decisional capacity face questions far deeper than the mere presence or absence of a patient’s informed consent. It will then present an (...) additional standard beyond the existing cognitive criteria – to be called the Narrative Coherence Standard – that may begin to bridge the gap between the existing legal standards and higher-order bioethical priorities. This standard will be treated with a philosophical argument for its use, as well as a detailed exploration of its technical components and conceptual underpinnings. (shrink)

The present paper is devoted to a detailed presentation of a new Military Ethics doctrine of fighting terror. It is proposed as an extension of the classical Just War Theory, which has been meant to apply to ordinary international conflicts. Since the conditions of a fight against terror are essentially different from the conditions that are assumed to hold in the classical war (military) paradigm or in the law enforcement (police) paradigm, a third model is needed. The paper proposes such (...) a model in the form of principles that should govern the activity of a democratic state when faced with terror. Eleven principle are proposed. Two are on the level of the state, including the Principle of Self-Defense Duty. Six are related to military preventive acts against activities of terror, including new formulations of a Principle of Military Necessity, a Principle of Distinction, and a Principle of Military Proportionality. Principles of Low Probabilities, Time Span Considerations and Professional Understanding are also included. Finally, three principles that are related to consciousness-directed activities against terror are added: a Principle of Permanent Notice, a Principle of Compensation, and a Principle of Operational Deterrence. The exposition of the principles is accompanied by arguments about their moral justification. The doctrine has been developed on the background of the IDF fight against acts and activities of terror performed by Palestinian individuals and organizations. (shrink)

Moderating effects of religiousness and spirituality on the relations between sexual and non-sexual dyadic communication with sexual and marital satisfaction were examined. Three hundred forty-two married Jewish women responded to self-report measures. Religiousness moderated the relations between both sexual and non-sexual communication with marital satisfaction—for the less religious these relations were stronger in comparison with the more religious—but not with sexual satisfaction. Sexual communication had a unique contribution to the prediction of sexual satisfaction while both types of communication demonstrated unique (...) contributions to the prediction of marital satisfaction. The implications of these findings on the role of dyadic communication in relational satisfaction and the meaning of sexual and marital satisfaction for the more and less religious are discussed. (shrink)

Abstract:This study explores the relationship between beauty and intellect, often represented as diametrical opposites, in Chinese and Jewish texts, particularly with reference to Confucian and rabbinic texts. Four discourses concerning the nexus of beauty and intellect are presented: antagonistic, complementary, authentic, and epistemic. In both traditions, although more so in Confucianism, intellect is sometimes elided with moral virtue, adding another element to the discussion. The comparison of this theme in distant traditions seeks to highlight their shared resistance to a single (...) interpretation or a consistent outlook: while Confucian texts tend to embrace a complementary discourse, along the lines of a physiognomic tradition, competing views can be detected. Likewise, the rabbinic tradition inherits the biblical view that "beauty is vain" but still manifests some cases of a complementary discourse. (shrink)

The conjoined themes of mission, migration, and nationalism are central issues in the Gospel of Luke. These essential motifs were amalgamated in a rhetorical composition to persuade implied readers to be mission-focused but accommodate the views of transiting communities or consular decisions and national pride. Luke 9:51–56 has been variedly interpreted on discipleship, media communication, Christological, and Elijah’s spirit tenets. Emphasising individual themes in the interpretation of Luke 9:51–56 is legitimate, but it leaves out a holistic understanding of the text (...) as the opening narrative of Luke’s travel narratives, which concerns multiple issues. This study engages the socio-rhetorical criticism propounded by Vernon K. Robbins to reinterpret Luke 9:51–56. The objective is to respond to the questions: (1) what is the relationship between mission, migration, and nationalism in Luke 9:51–56? and (2) what is the relevance of mission, migration, and nationalism in Luke 9:51–56 for African migrants in the diaspora? Contribution: There is a proximity between mission, migration, and nationalism in Luke 9:51–56. It prioritises mission over migration and nationalism. Mission is the key determinant for migration and nationalism. Migrant Africans emphasise migration for economic fortunes over mission and nationalism. This may be due to personal aspirations. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is to portray the nature of public trust in a military force within a democratic state and explain its importance. On grounds of a general conception of 'profession' and 'professional ethics', it is argued that a military force in a democratic state ought to nurture genuine public trust in itself, to take the form of a commonly or at least very broadly held presumption of proper functioning in all professional respects, including effectiveness, improvement and ethics. (...) It is also argued that external inquiry commissions, sometimes appointed to investigate a recent failure, within the framework of a military force, are counterproductive as attempts to enhance the required public trust. (shrink)

This chapter endeavors to show that the relevant contrasting term to friend in liberal political theory is not enemy but self. Given the skepticism that suffuses liberal theory, the self remains an endlessly problematic construct that gives us ongoing opportunities for reimagining and reconstructing what the behavior of both friends and enemies is truly like. The chapter examines key terms in the liberal epistemological vocabulary such as skepticism, empiricism, nominalism, and conventionalism to clarify their import for the liberal conceptions of (...) personal identity, friend, and enemy. Throughout, the chapter shows how the Levinasian deployment of the same–other distinction with its devolution upon the concept of infinity offers us a revealing guide to liberal political thought and practice and thereby also constitutes an important implicit critique of Schmitt. (shrink)

There is a way of looking at Christian doctrine as classically formulated by St. Paul in “Letter to the Romans” that enables us to see it as proceeding in a quite rigorous sense to introduce variations on monotheism (excavating and defining new dialectical pathways) that had been inaugurated by Judaism. The structure of Jewish belief that confronted St. Paul and his contemporaries had given rise to certain jarring paradoxes that St. Paul, with his Rabbinically trained mind1 that is amply in (...) evidence in the text of Romans, sought to resolve. I would like to map the emergence of these paradoxes…. (shrink)

A unifying perspective to bring to bear on Wittgenstein’s thought is that it represents a continual grappling with the problem of formulating a consistent version of scepticism--one that would not succumb to the charge of being self-refuting. His ultimate resolution of this problem hinges upon the precise content to be invested in his famous philosophical doctrine of the priority of Gezeigt over Gezagt. I shall argue for a democratic participatory gloss of this doctrine as offering the most satisfactory resolution to (...) the sceptical dilemmas haunting Wittgenstein. (shrink)

Journal of Religious Ethics, Volume 50, Issue 1, Page 21-39, March 2022.

A story of rabbinic poverty relief serves as the fulcrum of this presentation of a rabbinic perspective on wealth and taxes. The rabbinic move, from biblical to Mishnaic law, places the obligation of poverty relief on the city and suggests that the institutions of the polis are the only way to achieve justice on this scale. However, the city must be aware of the individual Other in making policy. In essence the story suggests that when policies ignore the face of (...) an individual stranger, they do not fulfill the demands of justice. This is the rabbinic attempt at threading the needle by walking in the tension between the obsessive asymmetry of the obligation towards the other person and the need for a larger more equitable system of justice which must include others. (shrink)

Tsiyune derekh be-filosofyah ha-yehudit be-sugiyot ha-ʻam ha-nivḥar.

Natural Logic is the science of valid argumentation in natural languages. Every native speaker of any natural language has logical intuitions, pronounceable by his assent or dissent to arguments presented to him in his natural language, like.

_Compelling account of Strauss's mature Maimonidean writings._.

We are grateful to Professors Nick Fotion, Bashshar Haydar and David L. Perry for their illuminating discussions of our paper, ?Military ethics of fighting terror: An Israeli perspective?, published in the present issue of the Journal of Military Ethics. We also thank the editors of the Journal for allowing us to add the present response. Professors Fotion, Haydar and Perry raise many significant issues. We will, however, presently address just a few of them, leaving the discussion of the other interesting (...) points to other occasions. (shrink)

Past research on sanctification has focused on the direct association between domain sanctification and domain satisfaction. This registered-report study focused on the predicted moderating function of sexual sanctification on the association between sexual and relationship satisfaction. An Internet panel sample of 740 women and 872 men, all married Jewish individuals residing in Israel, assessed the levels of their sexual and marital satisfaction, sexual sanctification, religiousness, and social desirability via an anonymous online questionnaire. As expected, sexual and marital satisfaction were highly (...) correlated. As predicted, sexual sanctification was found to moderate the association between sexual and marital satisfaction for women even after controlling for age, religiousness, and social desirability. However, although the positive association between sexual and relationship satisfaction was predicted to be larger at higher levels of sanctification than at lower levels, the moderation analysis revealed a reverse pattern. In addition, the moderation effect was significant for men only after controlling for religiousness. Post hoc analyses for moderated moderation confirmed significant gender differences in the moderation function of sexual sanctification. The importance of examining gender differences in future sanctification studies and the theoretical implications for the independence of sanctification from religiousness is discussed. (shrink)