This study explores how being satisfied with one’s life as an entrepreneur is a crucial ethical and psychological outcome of early volition and, subsequently, a vital resource in the development of a richer eudaimonic experience from entrepreneurship. We develop and test our predictions based on two independent datasets: American and Swedish business owners and early stage entrepreneurs. We argue and demonstrate that satisfaction with life as an entrepreneur conveys a distinct state of entrepreneurial well-being and constitutes a crucial self-evaluation which (...) mediates the effects of early volition in entrepreneurship on long-term eudaimonia. We contribute to the emerging conversations on entrepreneurship, business ethics, and well-being. (shrink)

This introduction to the role of information structure in grammar discusses a wide range of phenomena on the syntax-information structure interface. It examines theories of information structure and considers their effectiveness in explaining whether and how information structure maps onto syntax in discourse. Professor Erteschik-Shir begins by discussing the basic notions and properties of information structure, such as topic and focus, and considers their properties from different theoretical perspectives. She covers definitions of topic and focus, architectures of grammar, information (...) structure, word order, the interface between lexicon and information structure, and cognitive aspects of information structure.In her balanced and readable account, the author critically compares the effectiveness of different theoretical approaches and assesses the value of insights drawn from work in processing and on language acquisition, variation, and universals. This book will appeal to graduate students of syntax and semantics in departments of linguistics, philosophy, and cognitive science. (shrink)

Research in School-Based Art Therapy has been widely discussed in recent years, and the number of studies that examine staff perceptions and the special characteristics of art therapy within the education system has risen considerably. The current study explored the critical issue of adolescent clients’ perceptions of art therapy in school, from their point of view as clients. The methodology and data analysis were conducted according to the principles of Consensual Qualitative Research (CQR). The sample was composed of 12 adolescent (...) clients, aged 14–18 (M = 16), who took part in in-depth semi-structured interviews. The findings were organized into five domains that emerged from the interviews: referrals and initial engagement with therapy, the setting within school, the nature of art therapy at school, the relationship with the art therapist, and the impact of art therapy on these clients. The analysis revealed that although some participants initially agreed to art therapy because it got them out of class and let them have fun instead, they realized after a period of time of art therapy that they were engaged in a personal and emotional process focusing on them which allowed them to express their feelings without the fear of judgment. Participants at times used the word “mother” to describe their relationship with the art therapist, and stated that the presence of the art therapist at school made them feel safer and helped them deal with day-to-day problems. School-based... (shrink)

We propose that not social bonding, but rather a different mechanism underlies the development of musicality: being unable to survive alone. The evolutionary constraint of being dependent on other humans for survival provides the ultimate driving force for acquiring human faculties such as sociality and musicality, through mechanisms of learning and neural plasticity. This evolutionary mechanism maximizes adaptation to a dynamic environment.

The Star of Redemption is proposed as a criticism of Hegel’s thought and its logic of the Aufhebung, but Rosenzweig does not deny the truth of Hegel’s system, only the idea that it is absolute. From this point of view, Rosenzweig takes up “another” Hegel: that of his early writings—from which he draws Hegel’s conception of love—and that of The Phenomenology of Spirit—in which he searches for a system that is linked to experience. Based on these particular aspects of Hegel’s (...) philosophy, and moving beyond them, Rosenzweig builds a relational philosophy, whose elements are not sublated, but coexist with each other. We will analyze the fracture of Totality in the triad God-Mad-World to study their effective relationship through love, and the necessary link between Judaism and Christianity as a way of aniticipating Redemption. Having this link in mind, and against Hegel’s conception, Rosenzweig maintains that both religions share a common content, and that their relation is symbolized by the word “and”. (shrink)

One Health, as an international movement and as a research methodology, aspires to cross boundaries between disciplines. However, One Health has also been viewed as “reductionist” due to its overemphasize on physicians-veterinarians cooperation and surveillance capacity enhancement, while limiting the involvement with socio-political preconditioning factors that shape the impact of diseases, and the ethical questions that eventually structure interventions. The current article draws on a qualitative study of Brucellosis control in Israel, to address the benefits of broadening the One Health (...) perspective to include ethical considerations and the socio-political aspects of health. Using in-depth-interviews, observations and document review, the article analyzes stakeholders’ knowledge (policy makers, practitioners and livestock owners) to understand Brucellosis control interventions in the Negev region of Israel. The analysis highlights four different types of boundaries: geographical, professional, disciplinary and participatory. The variety of boundaries going beyond disciplinary ones, are often neglected by traditional One Health discourses, however they provide clearer understanding regarding the role of the Israel and Palestine relations; enforcement activities and trust creation; and mechanisms of decision-making and public participation, in Brucellosis interventions. A broad One Health analysis that addresses ethical concerns and socio-political environments, as well as human and veterinary medicine, encourages re-framing of causes and solutions when dealing particularly with Brucellosis in the Negev, but more generally with zoonotic diseases, low-trust settings and inequitable distribution of power. The inclusion of historical, political and bioethical considerations of Public Health in One Health creates opportunities to increase the relevance of One Health and expand its scope as a novel scientific paradigm. (shrink)

PurposePrevious studies examining the relationship between health-related quality of life and speech perception ability in cochlear implant users have yielded variable results, due to a range of factors, such as a variety of different HRQoL questionnaires and CI speech testing materials in addition to CI configuration. In order to decrease inherent variability and better understand the relationship between these measures in CI users, we administered a commonly used clinical CI speech testing battery as well as two popular HRQoL questionnaires in (...) bimodal and bilateral CI users.MethodsThe Glasgow Benefit Inventory, a modified five-factor version of the GBI, and the Nijmegen Cochlear Implant Questionnaire were administered to 25 CI users. Speech perception abilities were measured with the AzBio sentence test in several conditions.ResultsHigher performance scores on the GBI general subscore were related to greater binaural speech perception ability in noise. There were no other relationships between the GBI or NCIQ and speech perception ability under any condition. Scores on many of the GBI-5F factors were substantially skewed and asymmetrical; therefore, correlational analyses could not be applied. Across all participants, binaural speech perception scores were greater than first-ear CI only scores.ConclusionThe GBI general subscore was related to binaural speech perception, which is considered the everyday listening condition of bimodal and bilateral CI users, in noise; while the more CI-specific NCIQ did not relate to speech perception ability in any listening condition. Future research exploring the relationships between the GBI, GBI-5F, and NCIQ considering bimodal and bilateral CI configurations separately is warranted. (shrink)

How do the organization and presentation of large-scale social media images recondition the process by which visual knowledge, value, and meaning are made in contemporary conditions? Analyzing fundamental elements in the changing syntax of existing visual software ontology—the ways current social media platforms and aggregators organize and categorize social media images—this article relates how visual materials created within social media platforms manifest distinct modes of knowledge production and acquisition. First, I analyze the structure of social media images within data streams (...) as opposed to previous information organization in a structured database. While the database has no pre-defined notions of time and thus challenges traditional linear forms, the data stream re-emphasizes the linearity of a particular data sequence and activates a set of new relations to contemporary temporalities. Next, I show how these visual arrangements and temporal principles are manifested and discussed in three artworks: “Untitled” by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, The Clock by Christian Marclay, and Last Clock by Jussi Ängeslevä and Ross Cooper. By emphasizing the technical and poetic ways in which social media situate the present as a “thick” historical unit that embodies multiple and synchronous temporalities, this article illuminates some of the conditions, challenges, and tensions between former visual structures and current ones, and unfolds the cultural significations of contemporary big visual data. (shrink)

Scientific medicine carries within it an inherent contradiction. On the one hand, given its general scientific inquiry into health and disease, their conditions, etiologies, and treatments, it makes a claim for universality. To justify this claim, at different times and in different places, scientific medicine has prioritized techniques such as the medical gaze and autopsies to assure its diagnoses; it has applied numerical methods in order to have a better grasp of diseases and their possible treatments; it has used laboratory (...) analyses in order to understand life at its molecular level; and more recently it has introduced Randomized Clinical Trials in order to generalize clinical treatments. On the other hand, contrary to its universalistic claims, scientific medicine sets up and reifies boundaries. It creates distinctions between the healthy and the sick and defines categories, such as gender and race, that have deep political and social meanings. (shrink)

The BiDil affair brought once again to the fore questions of race and medicine. As discussed in other essays in this collection, the emergence of BiDil as the first medication approved and marketed for treating specific racial groups raises important questions for medicine and society: How are race and ethnicity framing our understanding of health and illness? Should treatment decisions be based on the race and ethnicity of patients? Should we encourage the development of race-specific medical treatments in order to (...) reduce health disparities? Or is this approach dangerous, and can it lead to unwanted consequences including racial stigmatization? These questions are not new, and since the introduction of race as a scientific construct in the late-19th century, race has played an important part in the history of medicine, most notoriously during World War II and the Holocaust. Yet the identification of race medicine with Nazi science tends to obscure the vast use of race as a medical construct by a wide range of medical scientists and practitioners across the political spectrum. In many instances, racial minorities were preoccupied with race medicine in order to promote the health of their own communities. One such group was that of Jewish physicians. (shrink)

ArgumentWe examine the creation and functioning of the “Pasteur Institute in Palestine” focusing on the relationship between biological science, health policy, and the creation of a “new society” within the framework of Zionism. Similar to other bacteriological institutes founded by colonial powers, this laboratory was developed in response to public health needs. But it also had a political role. Dr. Leo Böhm, a Zionist physician, strived to establish his institution along the lines of the Zionist aspiration to develop a national (...) entity based on strong scientific foundations. Even though the institute enjoyed several fruitful years of operation, mainly during World War I, it achieved no lasting national or scientific importance in the country. Böhm failed to adapt to new ways of knowledge production, scientifically and socially. The case study of the “Pasteur Institute in Palestine” serves as a prism to view the role of the public health laboratory in the history of Palestine with its ongoing changes of scientific, organizational, and political context. (shrink)

Journal of Human Values, Volume 28, Issue 2, Page 115-128, May 2022. Is emotional labour a burden or a boon to service providers who have greater workplace spirituality? We test a moderated mediation model in which emotional exhaustion mediates the conjoint effect of WS and emotional labour on job satisfaction. Linking conservation of resources theory with the mechanism of ‘value congruence’ in person–environment fit theory, we theorize that spiritual values are a key factor in generating necessary resource gains for deep (...) acting due to the value fit of these two motivational vectors. As a boundary condition for use of the benefits of DA, WS can bridge the gap between theoretical assumptions concerning the benefits of DA and the lack of empirical evidence that DA mitigates emotional exhaustion. Concurrently, we challenge the perception of WS as universally beneficial to employees’ wellbeing by proposing that WS amplifies the detrimental effects of surface acting because the externalized and inauthentic nature of this type of emotional regulation transgresses basic spiritual values. Our hypotheses find support in a study of 196 Israeli service providers at inbound call centres. (shrink)

In The interpretation of dreams Freud famously claimed to have finally solved the riddle of dreams. Yet amidst all the heated debates and intense controversies that ensued in the wake of this groundbreaking work, one fundamental question has been entirely overlooked, namely: in what sense, exactly, are dreams analogous to riddles? It will be the burden of this paper to show that a critical investigation of this seemingly simple question reveals a fundamental and hereto unnoticed discrepancy between Freud's rhetoric on (...) his method of dream interpretation and its application in practice. More specifically, whereas Freud argues that the psychoanalytic method can effectively solve the riddles of dreams by uncovering their pre-existing solutions, careful examination reveals that dream interpretations of this kind are the product of a very different solving technique, one that proceeds along a retroactive timeline rather than a linear one. Drawing on Wittgenstein's distinction between two kinds of riddles and the manner in which they are solved, I expound on the nature of retroactive riddle-solving, thus generating a distinctly different picture of psychoanalytic dream interpretation than the one envisioned and advocated by Freud. (shrink)

We give an example of two ordered structures $\mathcal {M},\mathcal {N}$ in the same language $\mathcal {L}$ with the same universe, the same order and admitting the same one-variable definable subsets such that $\mathcal {M}$ is a model of the common theory of o-minimal $\mathcal {L}$ -structures and $\mathcal {N}$ admits a definable, closed, bounded, and discrete subset and a definable injective self-mapping of that subset which is not surjective. This answers negatively two question by Schoutens; the first being whether (...) there is an axiomatization of the common theory of o-minimal structures in a given language by conditions on one-variable definable sets alone. The second being whether definable completeness and type completeness imply the pigeonhole principle. It also partially answers a question by Fornasiero asking whether definable completeness of an expansion of a real closed field implies the pigeonhole principle. (shrink)

We discuss the externally definable Ramsey property, a weakening of the Ramsey property for relational structures, where the only colourings considered are those that are externally definable: that is, definable with parameters in an elementary extension. We show a number of basic results analogous to the classical Ramsey theory, and show that, for an ultrahomogeneous structure M with countable age, the externally definable Ramsey property is equivalent to the dynamical statement that, for all $$n \in \mathbb {N} $$, every subflow (...) of the space $$S_n(M)$$ of n-types has a fixed point. We discuss a range of examples, including results regarding the lexicographic product of structures. (shrink)

Distinguishability plays a major role in quantum and statistical physics. When particles are identical their wave function must be either symmetric or antisymmetric under permutations and the number of microscopic states, which determines entropy, is counted up to permutations. When the particles are distinguishable, wavefunctions have no symmetry and each permutation is a different microstate. This binary and discontinuous classification raises a few questions: one may wonder what happens if particles are almost identical, or when the property that distinguishes between (...) them is irrelevant to the physical interactions in a given system. Here I sketch a general answer to these questions. For any pair of non-identical particles there is a timescale, \, required for a measurement to resolve the differences between them. Below \, particles seem identical, above it - different, and the uncertainty principle provides a lower bound for \. Thermal systems admit a conjugate temperature scale, \. Above this temperature the system appears to equilibrate before it resolves the differences between particles, below this temperature the system identifies these differences before equilibration. As the physical differences between particles decline towards zero, \ and \. (shrink)

The Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, following from the Graded Salience Hypothesis, is being reviewed and revisited. The attempt is to expand the notion of Optimal Innovation to allow it to apply to both stimuli’s coded meanings as well as their noncoded, constructed interpretations. According to the Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, Optimal Innovations, when devised, will be more pleasing than nonoptimally innovative counterparts. Unlike such competitors, Optimal Innovations deautomatize familiar coded alternatives, which invoke unconditional responses alongside novel but distinct ones, allowing both responses (...) to interact. Conversely, the Revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, introduced and tested here, follows from the Defaultness Hypothesis. It posits that both default lexicalized meanings and default constructed interpretations might be qualifiable for Optimal Innovation once they are deautomatized by nondefault, context-dependent counterparts. Such nondefault Optimal Innovations will be pleasing, more pleasing than default and nondefault counterparts not qualifiable for Optimal Innovation. Results of two experiments support the Revised Optimal Innovation Hypothesis, while further corroborating the Defaultness Hypothesis. (shrink)

Findings from two experiments argue in favor of the superiority of default, preferred interpretations over non-default less favored counterparts, outshining degree of non-salience, non-literalness, contextual strength, and negation. They show that, outside of a specific context, the default interpretation of specific negative constructions is a non-salient interpretation 1; their non-default interpretation is a salience-based alternative. In contrast, the default interpretation of the affirmative counterparts is a salience-based interpretation ; their non-default interpretation is a non-salient alternative. When in equally strongly supportive (...) contexts, default yet non-salient negative sarcasm is processed faster than non-default, non-salient yet affirmative sarcasm and faster than non-default yet salience-based negativ.. (shrink)

The controversy over vaccines has recently intensified in the wake of the global COVID-19 pandemic, with calls from politicians, health professionals, journalists, and citizens to take harsh measures against so-called “anti-vaxxers,” while accusing them of spreading “fake news” and as such, of endangering public health. However, the issue of suppression of vaccine dissenters has rarely been studied from the point of view of those who raise concerns about vaccine safety. The purpose of the present study was to examine the subjective (...) perceptions of professionals (physicians, nurses, researchers) involved with vaccines through practice and/or research and who take a critical view on vaccines, about what they perceive as the suppression of dissent in the field of vaccines, their response to it, and its potential implications on science and medicine. Respondents reported being subjected to a variety of censorship and suppression tactics, including the retraction of papers pointing to vaccine safety problems, negative publicity, difficulty in obtaining research funding, calls for dismissal, summonses to official hearings, suspension of medical licenses, and self-censorship. Respondents also reported on what has been termed a “backfire effect” – a counter-reaction that draws more attention to the opponents’ position. Suppression of dissent impairs scientific discourse and research practice while creating the false impression of scientific consensus. (shrink)

In this paper we show that focus structure determines the interpretation of bare plurals in English: topic bare plurals are interpreted generically, focused bare plurals are interpreted existentially. When bare plurals are topics they must be specific, i.e. they refer to kinds. After type-shifting they introduce variables which can be bound by the generic quantifier, yielding characterizing generics. Existentially interpreted bare plurals are not variables, but denote properties that are incorporated into the predicate.The type of predicate determines the interpretation of (...) its bare plural subject. The individual/stage-level distinction, though important, is not sufficient: since only arguments can be topics, only those stage-level predicates which have locative arguments can have existential bare plural subjects.Certain verbs (e.g., hate) fail to incorporate their bare plural objects; therefore no existential reading of the object is available. We provide a novel solution to this puzzle based on the following two claims: (i) incorporated bare plurals do not introduce discourse referents; (ii) nonincorporating verbs are presuppositional. (shrink)

The military service of combat soldiers may pose many threats to their well being and often take a toll on body and mind, influencing the physical and emotional make-up of combatants and veterans. The current study aims to enhance our knowledge about the combat experiences and the challenges that female soldiers face both during and after their service. The study is based on qualitative methods and narrative analysis of in-depth semi-structured personal interviews with twenty military veterans. It aims to analyze (...) the narratives of American and Israeli female combat soldiers regarding their military service, with emphasis on the soldiers’ descriptions, in their own words, about their difficulties, challenges, coping and successes during their service and transition to civilian life. A recurring theme in the interviews with the veterans of both militaries was the need to be heard and the fact that societies, therapists, and military institutions do not always truly listen to female veterans’ experiences and are not really interested in what actually ails them. Our research suggests that conventional methods used in research relating to veterans might at times be inadequate, because the inherent categorization might abstract, pathologize, and fragment a wide array of soldiers’ modes of post-combat being. Moreover, female veterans’ voices will not be fully heard unless we allow them to be active participants in generating knowledge about themselves. (shrink)

Our study contributes to the ongoing debate about women’s rights and religious feminism. The context for analysis of women’s experiences is the “Women of the Wall” who have been struggling for the past 30 years for their right to practice their spiritual rituals (praying at the Western Wall) in a hegemonic and masculine arena. We suggest that the “Women of the Wall” and their battle for spiritual equality threaten the hegemonic masculinity. Moreover, this feminist battle expands the feminist revolution and (...) the fights for women’s equality to the religious arena which is dominated by the hegemonic masculinity. The implementation of the Listening Guide, a feminist methodology, assists us in uncovering various voices, representing different aspects of the experiences of the “Women of the Wall” in a conflict zone. These narratives reveal juxtapositions of feelings of competence, determination and vulnerability and shed light on the women’s struggle for gender equality in a hegemonic masculine domain. (shrink)

Faith has many aspects. One of them is whether absolute logical proof for God’s existence is a prerequisite for the proper establishment and individual acceptance of a religious system. The treatment of this question, examined here in the Jewish context of Rabbi Prof. Eliezer Berkovits, has been strongly influenced in the modern era by the radical foundationalism and radical skepticism of Descartes, who rooted in the Western mind the notion that religion and religious issues are “all or nothing” questions. Cartesianism, (...) which surprisingly became the basis of modern secularism, was criticized by the classical American pragmatists. Peirce, James and Dewey all rejected the attempt to achieve infallible absolute knowledge, as well as the presumptuousness of establishing such a knowledge by means of casting Cartesian hyperbolic doubt. They advocated an alternative approach which was more holistic and humane. This paper lays out Descartes’s approach and the pragmatists’ critique. Despite the place that pragmatic considerations hold in Jewish tradition, some thinkers reject the relevance of these ideas. Yet Berkovits’s thought suggest a different path. He rejected Descartes’ radical skepticism and his radical foundationalism, in favor of a moderate foundationalism, which allows for a belief in God alongside constructive doubts. Similar to Peirce’s conception of the fixation of belief, Berkovits views local doubts (distinct from the hyperbolic doubt) as necessary for thought. Berkovits’s understanding of the biblical human-divine encounter, following Rosenzweig, Buber, and Heschel, is conceptualized here as “encounter theology”. Berkovits criticizes the propositionalist attempts to prove God’s existence logically, as well as the presumptuousness of basing religious belief on the teleological world-order. However, Berkovits’s conception of the ‘caring God’ is not provable, and thus defined as a pragmatic ‘postulate’. The article concludes by considering Berkovits’s “encounter theology”. In contrast to the approach described by Haym Soloveitchik, of halakhic stringency and lack of subjective experience of God’s face, Berkovits’s approach is dialogic through and through. (shrink)

This article explores the ways in which predictive information technologies are used in the field of personalized medicine and the relations between this use and how patients and disease are perceived. This is examined in a qualitative case study of a personalized cancer clinical trial, where oncologists made clinical decisions for each patient based on drug matchings and efficacy predictions produced by bioinformatic technologies and algorithms. I focus on personalized practice itself, as a postgenomic phenomenon, rather than on epistemic, ethical (...) and institutional critiques. Personalized medicine aims to process molecular, clinical, environmental and social data into individually tailored decisions. In this case, however, the engagement of clinicians with data and digital artefacts that processed multiple information sources resulted in treatment choices that were paradoxically both immutable and uncertain. In contrast to the situatedness of the body in postgenomics, this practice subverted the personalized medical approach while decontextualizing both cancer and patients. (shrink)

This article presents Franz Rosenzweig’s concept of redemption as a vehicle for raising some important questions for confronting the contemporary movement of Transhumanism. The upshot of our discussion is located in the existential questions asked, following a philosophical comparison of Rosenzweig’s religious and philosophical commitment to human life in its most robust form, with Transhumanism’s scientistic vision. To do so, the article first discusses some techno-scientistic assumptions of Transhumanism, showing that it presumes what was once a core principle of German (...) Idealism, the identity of reason and being, against which Rosenzweig rebelled. Then, the article turns to examine Rosenzweig’s humanistic redemptive vision and its emphasis on the corporeal, the temporal, and the worldly. The conclusion makes explicit the ways in which Rosenzweig’s redemptive vision provides a contrasting model to the one set forth by Transhumanism. (shrink)

This article examines A.J. Heschel’s “Theology of pathos” in light of the critique Eliezer Berkovits raised against it. Heschel’s theology of pathos is the notion of God as the “most moved mover”, who cares deeply for humans, and thus highly influencing their prophetic motivation for human-social improvement. Berkovits, expressing the negative-transcendent theology of Maimonides, assessed that Heschel’s theology of pathos is not systematic, is anthropomorphic, and reflects a foreign Christian influence. However, when checking Berkovits’s own views as a thinker, it (...) turns out that he formulated some immanent theological notions that were overlapping those of Heschel, for example in attributing God the personal trait of caring. Surprisingly, most Heschel’s scholars did not consider this point. This riddle addressed here in two ways: (1) Psychological and Social, on which I understand Berkovits’s critique as a way of coping with his own religious perplexities, and in a wider sense, it is asserted that trans-denominational critique may be a discursive opportunity for mutual corrigibility. (2) Theological, since Heschel and Berkovits indeed faced a similar theological challenge, of rejecting any description of God as anthropomorphism. I thus offer a constructive theological argument for providing a justification to the immanent theologies of both Heschel and Berkovits. (shrink)

In classical American pragmatism, fallibilism refers to the conception of truth as an ongoing process of improving human knowledge that is nevertheless susceptible to error. This paper traces appearances of fallibilism in Jewish thought in general, and particularly in the halakhic thought of Eliezer Berkovits. Berkovits recognizes the human condition’s persistent mutability, which he sees as characterizing the ongoing effort to interpret and apply halakhah in shifting historical and social contexts as Torat Ḥayyim. In the conclusion of the article, broader (...) questions and observations are raised regarding Jewish tradition, fallibility, and modernity, and the interaction between Judaism and pragmatism in the history of ideas. (shrink)

Three thousand belligerents, mostly belonging to the military arm of Hamas, stormed Southern Israel on October 7th, 2023. Along with 3,000 rockets fired at Israel from Gaza, these belligerents inva...

This paper traces two contradicting beliefs about death and immortality in the writings of Rabbi Hayyim Hirschensohn, and examines these opposing beliefs in his Halakhic ruling, in the case of Autopsies. The paper opens by conceptualizing two possible attitudes regarding the relation between this-world and the ʽother-world’, and by analyzing two main beliefs regarding death and immortality in their relation to the body-spirit distinction (the naturalistic and the spiritualistic approach). It demonstrates how Hirschensohn was holding these two different views. The (...) paper then moves to examine whether his halakhic ruling may help us in understanding which approach was Hirschensohn’s favorable belief, by investigating his halakhic ruling regarding autopsies. Hirschensohn permits to perform such surgeries, however subject to some halakhic limitations. The paper concludes that the naturalistic belief regarding death appears to be the more dominant one in his thought. Finally, I point out a few consequences of this paper, for addressing some contemporary ethical dilemmas regarding human corpses. (shrink)