In thirteenth-century Castile, the kabbalist R. Joseph of Hamadan offered an unprecedented articulation of the idea of reincarnation (gilgul), proposing that Jewish men could be reborn as gentiles, women, or even animals. This article studies the formation of the Jewish belief in the transmigration of human souls into animal bodies, focusing on the question of animal pain. It contextualizes the kabbalistic literary treatment of animals by examining the thirteenth-century European genre of bestiaries, which attempted to instill proper morals in readers (...) by associating animals with sinners. Although the idea of animal reincarnation led kabbalists to treat animals as creatures with human souls, it did not lead to a fundamental or radical shift in the treatment of animals. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Theologian's Doubts:Natural Philosophy and the Skeptical Games of GhazālīLeor HaleviIn the history of skeptical thought, which normally leaps from the Pyrrhonists to the rediscovery of Sextus Empiricus in the sixteenth century, Abū Ḥāmid Muḥammad al-Ghazālī (1058-1111) figures as a medieval curiosity. Skeptical enough to merit passing acknowledgment, he has proven too baffling to be treated fully alongside pagan, atheist, or materialist philosophers. As a theologian defending certain Muslim (...) dogmas, Ghazālī has not met what historians consider the mark of the true skeptic, a mind doubting the possibility of all systems of knowledge. But what is fascinating about him is that he brought into practical operation the tools of what I call "functional skepticism."1He denied the claims to truth of Aristotelian physics—whose basis he showed to rest on groundless belief—then turned and argued for the possibility of the Resurrection tooth and nail. The scholarly debate on The Incoherence of the Philosophers (Tahāfut al-falāsifa) has concentrated on the extent to which Ghazālī qua Ashcarite theologian was seduced into Aristotelian philosophy despite himself.2 In my view this debate has been misguided in the attempt to distill the [End Page 19] essence of Ghazālī from the book's eclectic theology; I will argue for a different view of Ghazālī on the basis of a close reading of key passages. In the unusual sections where Ghazālī applies Aristotelian language to a world not following the ordinary laws of physics, some have found Ghazālī slipping, unconsciously perhaps, into an Aristotelian frame of mind. I will show that, as a skeptical theologian with a dialogic imagination, he was rather deconstructing Aristotelian discourse while playing a Wittgensteinian sort of language game.Natural Philosopher or Speculative Theologian?The disagreement about the extent to which philosophy infected Ghazālī is ancient. Ghazālī might have studied philosophy only in order to refute it. He himself defended his philosophizing with the claim that one cannot deconstruct a system of thought until one has understood it so deeply as to elaborate upon its fundamental principles.3 His Maqāṣid al-falāsifa was in fact received, especially in trans-Pyrenean Europe, as a philosopher's genuine summary of the object of philosophy.4 The book strikes me as suspiciously creative in its representation of philosophical discourse, but it appears in any case as an expert and surprisingly unbiased treatment.5 Arabic readers knew that Ghazālī had also written a polemical treatise against philosophy, Tahāfut al-falāsifa, but they still wondered about his engagement with the ideas he challenged. Abū Bakr Ibn al-cArabī, for example, commented that Ghazālī had been unable to extricate himself from philosophy.6 Other philosophers pondered whether or not he had been a closeted member of their charmed circle and sought in his writings traces of esoteric philosophy.7Averroës's own sober sense of distance between philosophy and theology was partially a reaction to what he perceived as Ghazālī's dangerous and carefree mixture of the two sciences.8 He attacked Ghazālī's book in The Incoherence [End Page 20] of the Incoherence to restore philosophy's sense of purity, an aim he sought to accomplish by separating religious concerns from the philosopher's field of inquiry.9 Ironically, such a separation is precisely what Ghazālī might have wished to provoke by crisscrossing and blurring the line between religion and philosophy.The modern debate on chapter 17 of Tahāfut al-falāsifa has concentrated on defining Ghazālī as either a natural philosopher or an occasionalist theologian. In his defense of the possibility of miracles Ghazālī presented two theories of causation, one denying the logical basis of Aristotelian notions of natural causality, and the other more or less adopting these notions. Jointly, the two theories have seemed incompatible, and for this reason scholars have attempted to sort Ghazālī out of the apparent confusion. In 1978 L. E. Goodman argued persuasively that Ghazālī exploited rather than denied the philosophers' ideas of causality. In two articles Michael Marmura challenged Goodman, contending... (shrink)

There are two primary philosophical approaches to examining the relationship between human bodies and political bodies. The first, reflected in traditional political theory on the body politic, is concerned with the question of how individuals aggregate into functioning or malfunctioning collectives—how singular citizen bodies come to constitute wider political entities. The second approach, maturing later in 20th century social and political philosophy, considers the opposite relation: instead of evaluating how the body politic emerges from the bottom-up, it focuses on how (...) bodies become politicized from the top-down. This, more sociological, perspective explores how human bodies are disciplined and learn to self-discipline into particular physical forms and functions. Dominant ideologies can infiltrate the bodies of adherents, and the task of the social critic or political philosopher is to delineate how, why, where, and when political structures shape the minds and bodies of citizens, as well as whether the effects are coercive, destructive, or liberatory. I will argue that a political philosophy of mind cannot flourish without attention to the cognitive science of ideologies. Until recently there has been little serious dialogue between biology and political philosophy, partly due to disciplinary balkanization and mostly because of the infancy of empirical biopolitics, the science of how cognitive and neurobiological processes are molded by political ideologies. I will suggest that attending to the emerging science of ideological cognition can allow us to build a stronger, more compelling, and provocative thesis on the mind-shaping consequences of immersion in ideologies than is possible with conceptual tools alone. (shrink)

Research into the roots of ideological extremism has traditionally focused on the social, economic, and demographic factors that make people vulnerable to adopting hostile attitudes toward outgroups. However, there is insufficient empirical work on individual differences in implicit cognition and information processing styles that amplify an individual’s susceptibility to endorsing violence to protect an ideological cause or group. Here we present original evidence that objectively assessed cognitive inflexibility predicts extremist attitudes, including a willingness to harm others, and sacrifice one’s life (...) for the group. Across two samples (N = 1,047) from the United Kingdom and United States, structural equation models demonstrated that cognitive inflexibility predicted endorsement of violence to protect the national ingroup, which in turn predicted a willingness to die for the group. These statistical models accounted for an average of 31.4% of the variance in willingness to die for the group, after accounting for demographic variables. Furthermore, cognitive inflexibility was related to greater confidence in the decision to sacrifice one’s life in an ingroup trolley problem scenario. Analysis of participants’ performance on the cognitive tasks revealed that cognitive rigidity – distinctly from other aspects of cognition – was specifically implicated as a cognitive antecedent of extremist attitudes. Implications for the study of radicalization and identity fusion throug... (shrink)

The realism-social constructionism debate has been consequential over the last several decades. Silverstein’s vocabulary of micro-/macro-contexts aids in understanding why the tension can be a useful epistemological heuristic for discourse analysts. Narratives were collected in focus groups of Ethiopian-Israeli college students. Five narratives were selected for ethnic mentions and found to have a particular ‘iterative’ ‘emplotment scenario’ – recurrent storylines and settings – across tellers and telling events. ‘the only Ethiopian’ is an IES of being sent away to a majority-White (...) elementary/secondary school, socially isolated and denigrated. How are we to understand it when a particular plotline and setting recur in our corpora? I argue that although each story and storytelling is unique, they all borrow from a larger-than-single-telling, already existent trope, that is, a budding master narrative. Taken together, a unique view of a particular socio-cultural process – in this case, something of what it means to be an Ethiopian Israeli – emerges. (shrink)

(1973). Pragmatic, Existentialist and Phenomenological Interpretations of Marxism. Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology: Vol. 4, No. 2, pp. 139-152.

Shaun Gallagher argues that we need a new philosophy of nature that accommodates the insights of existential phenomenology. On his view existential phenomenology needs a philosophy of nature that is holistic, relational, and non-reductionist. I argue that his reasoning is based on a misunderstanding of the difference between the manifest image and the scientific image. The reasons why we should prefer a non-reductionist philosophy of nature are internal to the historical development of the scientific image itself. We have good reasons (...) for preferring enactivism over cognitivism as a research program for the cognitive sciences, but compatibility with the manifest image is not one of those reasons. (shrink)

I argue that Sellars’s naturalization of Kant should be understood in terms of how he used behavioristic psychology and cybernetics. I first explore how Sellars used Edward Tolman’s cognitive-behavioristic psychology to naturalize Kant in the early essay “Language, Rules, and Behavior”. I then turn to Norbert Wiener’s understanding of feedback loops and circular causality. On this basis I argue that Sellars’s distinction between signifying and picturing, which he introduces in “Being and Being Known,” can be understood in terms of what (...) I call cybernetic behaviorism. I interpret picturing in terms of cycles of cybernetic behavior and signifying in terms of coordination between cybernetic behavior systems, or what I call triangulated cybernetic behavior. This leads to a formal, naturalistic understanding of personhood as the capacity to engage in triangulated cybernetic behavior. I conclude by showing that Sellars’s thought has the resources, which he did not exploit, for introducing the concept of second-order cybernetics. This suggests that Sellars’s philosophy of mind could be developed in the direction of autopoiesis and enactivism. (shrink)

As knowledge creation quickly gains importance for globally active corporations, we attempt to combine the advantages of the Stakeholder View with those of the SECI model by Nonaka and Takeuchi. In order to support the mental processes of the stakeholders, we use so-called topic maps to transform implicit into explicit knowledge and to visualize it. The preliminary propositions are illustrated by the case study of Swiss Re.

Christia (2015) argues that my criticism of Sellars -- that for Sellars, all intentionality is what I call "discursive intentionality" -- relies on a misunderstanding of Sellarsian intuitions (see Sachs 2014). Here I respond to Christias by pointing that that while is correct that Sellars has a distinction between full-blown linguistic intentionality and perceptual takings, Sellars's theory of perceptual takings cannot do justice to the figure/ground structure of embodied perception stressed by Merleau-Ponty.

While everyone has heard of the 'Humboldt Current', few know anything of the man after whom it was named. Yet Alexander von Humboldt was a towering figure of his time - scientist, explorer, and polymath, imbued with Enlightenment ideas. Aaron Sachs' colourful intellectual history rescues Humboldt from obscurity, and reveals the impact of a single European on both American thought and the environmental movement.

In this paper we aim to show that based on an effective stakeholder management corporations are able to build and maintain three important licences tosuccessfully fulfil their fundamental value creation task, namely the licence to operate, the licence to compete and the licence to innovate. The corporation is regarded as an institution engaged in mobilizing resources for productive uses in order to create wealth with and for its stakeholders. Our concept of the three licences is based on the widely discussed (...) (e.g. Bracken, 2003; Buono, 2003; Caldwell, 2004; Jones, Wicks, & Freeman, 2002; Lamont, 2004; Walsh, 2005) “Stakeholder View” framework by Post, et al. (2002) which concerns the firm’s interactions with its stakeholders. Our concept of the three licences is supported by the results of our qualitative case research in the financial services and the telecommunications industry. (shrink)

Kierkegaard's philosophy is the description of the structure and behavior of human consciousness. Adi Shmüeli reconstructs that philosophy by showing that it always reflects the structure in question, and thus provides a useful key to Kierkegaard's work. Mr. Shmüeli approaches his task by analyzing first the aesthetic, ethical, and religious stages of life as successive steps in the gradual awakening of consciousness. He then describes the alienation of consciousness, of which Kierkegaard speaks in all his works, and discusses Kierkegaard's theory (...) of indirect communication, philosophical action whose aim is to awaken consciousness in order to rescue it from alienation. Studying Kierkegaard's observations on Christianity as indirect communication, Professor Shmüeli deals also with his reflections on the philosophical problem of truth. His concluding chapter discusses the temporality and historicity of human consciousness. Quotations, taken primarily from accessible English translations, are generously provided to put the reader in direct contact with Kierkegaard's own words. Originally published in 1971. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905. (shrink)

The first part of this paper examines conditions in accord with Einstein's criterion of regularity on the field solutions everywhere that would correspond to the existence of a black hole star, following from solutions of his (nonvacuum) field equations. ‘Black hole’ is defined here as a star whose matter is so condensed as to correspond to a complete family of spatially closed geodesics. The condition imposed is that the angular momentum of a test body in each of the closed geodesics (...) is a constant of the motion. The second part of the paper examines the implications in the problem of the condensed star of a generalized (factorized) version of the metrical field equations, discovered earlier by the author. It is found that in general relativity stars should naturally pulsate, and in its succeeding cycles the gravitational radius of the star is attenuated by a factor exp(−0.349T), where T is the pulsation period. Conditions are discussed for the possibility that the (relatively) regular emissions of radiation from a pulsar may be dynamically rooted in a (smaller) part of the pulsation cycle when the star is out of the black hole state (less dense → open geodesics)—when radiation would be emitted to the outside world—and the (greater) part of the cycle when it is in the black hole state (more dense → closed geodesics)—when radiation would not be emitted. (shrink)

To corroborate the music and social bonding hypothesis, we propose that future investigations isolate specific components of social bonding and consider the influence of context. We deconstruct and operationalize social bonding through the lens of social psychology and provide examples of specific measures that can be used to assess how the link between music and sociality varies by context.

The paper of Klaus Leisinger is a comprehensive description and reflection on the role and responsibilities of key stakeholders to complex and urgent issues, and suggests novel approaches such as stakeholder collaborations for Global Health. Most corporations have, until recently, focused on a small set of stakeholders in regard to creating corporate value. Increasingly, however, corporations are facing broad ranging and complex issues. To deal with them, they realize that their present business model might be too narrow. To improve the (...) quality of life of poor patients in low-income countries, a broader set of stakeholders needs to be included in new and innovative ways. (shrink)

In his most recent work, McDowell argues that the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism can be avoided only by an ‘equipoise’ between the objective and the subjective. However, I argue that Adorno’s ‘cognitive utopia’ is a genuine 4th option distinct from equipoise and from the oscillation between the Myth of the Given and coherentism. McDowell’s inability to acknowledge the cognitive utopia is traced to his overly abstract conception of the disenchantment of nature, in contrast to Adorno’s (...) emphasis on the domination of nature. This difference is traced to their different interpretations of Hegel. (shrink)

ABSTRACTEmpathy involves a mapping between the emotions observed in others and those experienced in one’s self. However, effective social functioning also requires an ability to differentiate one’s...

Practitioners and leading scholars emphasize the need of integrating the notion of stakeholder more systematically into strategy theory. In corporate reality, this process has been on its way for quite some time because companies realized that a one-sided orientation to short-term shareholder value is a too narrow conception for strategic management, especially since firms’ strategically relevant resources today are not purely of financial nature but most importantly knowledge oriented. This paper will evaluate some insights into good practices of strategic stakeholder (...) management in the financial services industry and the telecommunications industry of Switzerland in order to stimulate the ongoing learning process in strategic stakeholder management. The results do support appropriateness of stakeholder management in situations of turbulence and as useful extension of conventional approaches in strategic management. (shrink)

I hold that we could justifiably criminalize some threats, on account of the fact that issuing them renders one more likely to commit a crime. But I also point out that if we criminalize some threat-issuing, we will de facto criminalize some warning-issuing, which is unjust. So we ought not to criminalize any threat-issuing. Instead, we should criminalize rendering oneself more likely to commit a crime. This would allow us to punish all the threat-issuers we should want to punish. It (...) would also force us to punish some warning-issuers, but we would not be punishing them for their warning-issuing. (shrink)

Sadness is generally seen as a negative emotion, a response to distressing and adverse situations. In an aesthetic context, however, sadness is often associated with some degree of pleasure, as suggested by the ubiquity and popularity, throughout history, of music, plays, films and paintings with a sad content. Here, we focus on the fact that music regarded as sad is often experienced as pleasurable. Compared to other art forms, music has an exceptional ability to evoke a wide-range of feelings and (...) is especially beguiling when it deals with grief and sorrow. Why is it, then, that while human survival depends on preventing painful experiences, mental pain often turns out to be explicitly sought through music? In this article we consider why and how sad music can become pleasurable. We offer a framework to account for how listening to sad music can lead to positive feelings, contending that this effect hinges on correcting an ongoing homeostatic imbalance. Sadness evoked by music is found pleasurable (1) when it is perceived as non-threatening; (2) when it is aesthetically pleasing; and (3) when it produces psychological benefits such as mood regulation, and empathic feelings, caused, for example, by recollection of and reflection on past events. We also review neuroimaging studies related to music and emotion and focus on those that deal with sadness. Further exploration of the neural mechanisms through which stimuli that usually produce sadness can induce a positive affective state could help the development of effective therapies for disorders such as depression, in which the ability to experience pleasure is attenuated. (shrink)