This book centers on a relatively neglected theme in the scholarly literature on Hannah Arendt's political thought: her support for a new form of government in which citizen councils would replace contemporary representative democracy and allow citizens to participate directly in decision-making in the public sphere. The main argument of the book is that the council system, or more broadly the vision of participatory democracy was far more important to Arendt than is commonly understood. Seeking to demonstrate the close links (...) between the council system Arendt advocated and other major themes in her work, the book focuses particularly on her critique of the nation-state and her call for a new international order in which human dignity and “the right to have rights” will be guaranteed; her conception of “the political” and the conditions that can make this experience possible; the relationship between philosophy and politics; and the challenge of political judgement in the modern world. (shrink)

Timeless lessons are retold here with reverence and charm. The values that we all want our children to absorb - faith, kindness, forgiveness, charity - are made clear through traditional, biblical stories coupled with examples, and charming illustrations by Tova Katz. Shmuel Blitz, the author of five other successful children's books, goes back to the greatest source of all - the Torah and the Prophets. Do your children and grandchildren (and yourself) a favor and get them this fine new (...) book. (shrink)

Et si la domination n'etait pas la ou on la croit? Et si la facon dont nous nous representons aujourd'hui l'identite, l'humain, les genres, la nature, mais aussi la democratie, le rapport a l'etranger, le contenu meme du savoir, la finalite du droit, si tout cela ne relevait pas en realite d'un savoir objectif mais d'une - ideologie - qui projette de changer l'ordre social et politique mais surtout l'humain? C'est le propre de toute epoque que de trouver dans un (...) ordre d'idees le principe du pouvoir et de la coherence, sauf que cette ideologie se presente comme l'anti-pouvoir, le facteur d'une liberte jamais imaginee. Ce court ouvrage s'efforce d'en construire le modele et de prendre la mesure de l'ampleur de l'agenda du post-modernisme, cette pensee nee en France dans les annees 1970, redecouverte aux etats-Unis et devenue, depuis, la - langue commune - de toutes les elites du monde democratique, a travers ses multiples visages: multiculturalisme, post colonialisme, queer theory, altermondialisme, mondialisme, etc. Dans la perspective de la sociologie de la connaissance, Shmuel Trigano tente d'identifier les centres de pouvoir et l'ordre nouveau qu'installe cette ideologie pour comprendre le contexte de son developpement, notamment la decomposition de l'etat-nation europeen des suites de l'unification europeenne, grosse, selon lui d'une forme de pouvoir de type imperial. Un livre de savoir mais aussi un livre engage qui alerte face a la derniere nee des utopies politiques.". (shrink)

Political theory lacks a compelling account of public property. Addressing this gap, I present a “deep public ownership” model, according to which the body politic ultimately owns all the resources within its jurisdiction. I argue that this model is compatible with liberal intuitions regarding private property. I then contend that the model expands the scope of government’s duty to uphold the equality of all citizens, by challenging private property constraints on antidiscriminatory government policies. I anticipate the worry that the model (...) supports excessive government intrusion into private affairs. I close by discussing abuse of public property by elected leaders. (shrink)

below) is the so called Borda ranking method. Our work differs from the previous studies in three respects: First, in our model each individual's list of paired comparisons of the alternatives is assumed to be connected and asynunetric and not necessarily transitive.

Is it only yesterday's humanism, whether religious or secular in origin, that is dying - and is it really dying? - or is it more profoundly the very paradigm of humanity? At least it is worth asking the question. Do we not hear on every side today that everything is ‘constructed’ and ‘formated’? No inherited moral standard now seems acceptable, nor any reference to any sort of human nature or naturality. The only idea that henceforth finds acceptance is that of (...) the infinite plasticity of the human, leaving individuals free to shape themselves as they wish beyond any commonly received standard, since only defiance of the norm seems to be the source and proof of freedom. (shrink)

Hannah Arendt’s conceptualization of political judgement has been a source of much scholarly investigation and debate in recent decades. Underlying the debate is the assumption that at least in her early writings, Arendt had an actor’s theory of judgement. In this article I challenge this common assumption. As I attempt to demonstrate, it relies on a misunderstanding, not only of Arendt’s conception of judgement, but also of her conception of agents in the public realm. Once we discard the assumption of (...) an actor’s theory of judgement, I argue, some important issues in Arendt’s theory of judgement are resolved, enabling us to perceive it as a unified, rather than self-contradictory, theory of judgement. (shrink)

This book is the result of several decades of teaching experience in data structures and algorithms. It is self-contained but does assume some prior knowledge of data structures, and a grasp of basic programming and mathematics tools. Basic Concepts in Algorithms focuses on more advanced paradigms and methods combining basic programming constructs as building blocks and their usefulness in the derivation of algorithms. Its coverage includes the algorithms' design process and an analysis of their performance. It is primarily intended as (...) a textbook for the teaching of Algorithms for second-year undergraduate students in study fields related to computers and programming. Klein reproduces his oral teaching style in writing, with one topic leading to another, related one. Most of the classical and some more advanced subjects in the theory of algorithms are covered, though not in a comprehensive manner. The topics include Divide and Conquer, Dynamic Programming, Graph algorithms, probabilistic algorithms, data compression, numerical algorithms and intractability. Each chapter comes with its own set of exercises, and solutions to most of them are appended. (shrink)

The importance of Hannah Arendt’s intellectual dialogue with her husband, Heinrich Blücher is widely acknowledged, yet it has rarely been systematically studied. In this paper, I use Blücher’s lectures to highlight the way some of his reflections and insights shed new light on Arendt’s political thought. Blücher, I seek to show, offers through the figure of Socrates an alternative under­standing of the meaning of philosophy and its relation to politics. His reflections help us see that Arendt worked with two conceptions (...) of philosophy: not only the dominant one in the Western philosophical tradition, of which she was famously critical, but also an alternative one in which philosophy and politics become mutually supportive, rather than mutually exclusive activities. What emerges from the comparison between Arendt’s and Blücher’s reflections on the relationship between philosophy and politics, I argue, is a joint and life-long commitment on the part of both to question the philosophical tradition in order to offer new theoretical foundations for participatory democratic citizenship. (shrink)

We continue the works of Gurevich-Shelah and Lifsches-Shelah by showing that it is consistent with ZFC that the first-order theory of random graphs is not interpretable in the monadic theory of all chains. It is provable from ZFC that the theory of random graphs is not interpretable in the monadic second order theory of short chains (hence, in the monadic theory of the real line).

Assume ZFC is consistent then for everyB⫅ω there is a generic extension of the ground world whereB is recursive in the monadic theory ofω 2.

The monadic second-order theory of trees allows quantification over elements and over arbitrary subsets. We classify the class of trees with respect to the question: does a tree T have definable Skolem functions? This continues [6] where the question was asked only with respect to choice functions. A natural subclass is defined and proved to be the class of trees with definable Skolem functions. Along the way we investigate the spectrum of definable well orderings of well ordered chains.

When discussing whether or not our elected governments should intervene to end genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing, and crimes against humanity in other countries, the humanitarian intervention debate has largely been assuming that liberal democracies bear no responsibility for the injustice at hand: someone else is committing shameful acts; we are merely considering whether or not we have a positive duty to do something about it. Here I argue that there are important instances in which this dominant third party perspective (...) (TPP) is empirically false and normatively misguided. Much before our positive ?responsibility to protect? potential victims from mass atrocities, we violate our negative duty not to harm these victims. Employing work by Thomas Pogge and Leif Wenar, I argue that this harm currently comes about as our elected governments either buy, or allow our corporations to buy, the world's most precious resources from brutal dictators and warlords, who dominate some of the states that are at the heart of intervention discussions. In these cases, democracies' most immediate duty is not intervention but rather humanitarian disintervention: boycotting severely oppressive regimes, and in particular stopping to recognizing these regimes ? whether dictators or civil warriors ? as possessing legitimate authority to sell their peoples' resources. I begin with a brief survey of the intervention literature, followed by the foundations for the disintervention alternative. I then elaborate the conceptual and practical advantages of disintervention, concluding with thoughts on the reasons for TPP's lasting dominance. (shrink)

Philosophizing the indefensible asks what distinctive contributions political philosophers might make when reflecting on blatant moral failures in public policy - the kinds of failures that philosophers usually dismiss as theoretically un-interesting, even if practically important. This book argues that political philosophers can and should craft "strategic" arguments for public policy reforms, showing how morally urgent reforms can be grounded, for the sake of discussion, even in problematic premises associated with their opponents. The book starts by developing the general contours (...) of this approach - defending its general moral value in a democratic society, and examining how far one might go in strategically deploying dubious or even repugnant premises in debating public affairs. The book then applies strategic theorizing to a set of diverse policy issues. These range from the abortion debate and financial regulation in the United States, through controversies surrounding the participation of Arab parties in Israel's political process, to global issues, such as commercial ties with oil-rich dictatorships, and the bearing of such ties on global climate change. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Philosophy 42.1 (2004) 112-113 [Access article in PDF] Moses Mendelssohn: The First English Biography and Translations. Introduction by James Schmidt. Vol. 1: M. Samuels [sic]. Memoirs of Moses Mendelsohn [sic]. Pp. xxi + 178. Vol. 2: Writings Related to Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. Translated by M. Samuel. Pp. ix + 329. Vol. 3: Mendelssohn's Jerusalem. Translated by M. Samuel. Pp. 371. Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, 2002. (...) Cloth, $295.00. In 1827, the Scottish historian, Thomas Carlyle, who believed history was an impressive gallery of great men, wrote that the life of the Jewish philosopher from Berlin, Moses Mendelssohn, was "full of encouragement for all lovers of self improvement." This was just one more stone in the edifice of the Mendelssohnian myth, whose foundations had already been laid during Mendelssohn's lifetime, and which continued to grow after his death, until he became an icon of culture. For the Jews Mendelssohn was a source of pride, proof that Jews could become integrated into the life of liberal Europe and contribute to its culture without assimilating.Moses Samuel (1795-1860), the Jewish scholar from Bristol who earned his living as a watchmaker and silversmith, was undoubtedly one of Mendelssohn's most fervent admirers. Like others before him, who were inspired by the fact that Mendelssohn had the same first name as the biblical Moses, Samuel depicted him as a giant with a redemptive mission in Jewish history, deserving of credit for the entrance of Jews into the modern age: "Like his prototype and namesake Moses, Mendelssohn delivered his people from the bondage of their benighted taskmasters; like him, he led them forty years through the desert of ignorance and superstition, during which he sustained them with the manna of his wisdom" (vol. 1, 112-13). The biography Samuel published in London in 1825 was the first book on Mendelssohn written in English. Making no attempt to conceal his intent to depict an illustrious, exemplary personality, he even omitted facts that might have flawed the perfection of the Mendelssohnian myth. But this in no way detracts from the value of that interesting and comprehensive cultural work that Samuel created in England of the 1820s and '30s, which has now been printed in its entirety in an attractive, three-volume edition, edited by James Schmidt.Far more than a biography intended to expand the camp of Mendelssohn's admirers, it was a scholarly attempt, accompanied by notes and detailed explanations, to acquaint English readers with the Jewish philosopher through some of his major works on Judaism. The first volume contains the biography along with important appendices, including a list of all of Mendelssohn's writings in Hebrew and German, Samuel's scholarly notes and biographical sketches of some of the key figures in Mendelssohn's life, such as Thomas Abbt, Johann Caspar Lavater, and Gotthold Ephraim Lessing. The second and third volumes contain a selection of the writings that Samuel saw fit to translate, and these were published in 1838. This was not a random selection. Mendelssohn, the philosopher who made a contribution to the contemporary German Enlightenment and regarded Leibnitz and Wolf as his main mentors, was not the figure Samuel wanted to present to his readers. Instead he wanted to present Mendelssohn's position on Judaism and Christianity. Consequently, [End Page 112] in the second volume he included a translation of texts connected with Mendelssohn's polemic against Lavater (who publicly challenged Mendelssohn in 1769 to explain his commitment to Judaism or to convert) and his 1783 preface to Menasseh ben Israel's Vindiciae Judaeorum, in which he expressed his opposition to religious discipline and excommunication. The third volume contains the complete translation of Jerusalem (1783), Mendelssohn's best known work, in which he declared his firm adherence to the Jewish religion, defined by him as a religion of the revealed law, along with two hundred pages of the translator's notes that make the book the first work of commentary of its kind.The critical reader, familiar with the wealth of highly developed research that in recent... (shrink)

The thinkers presented in these lectures by Bergman represent a radical departure from objectivism and subjectivism.

Can we talk about "the people" as an agent with its own morally important integrity? How should we understand ownership of public property by "the people"? Nili develops philosophical answers to both of these questions, arguing that we should see the core project of a liberal legal system – realizing equal rights - as an identity-grounding project of the sovereign people, and thus as essential to the people's integrity. He also suggests that there are proprietary claims that are intertwined in (...) the sovereign people's moral power to create property rights through the legal system. The practical value of these ideas is illustrated through a variety of real-world policy problems, ranging from the domestic and international dimensions of corruption and abuse of power, through transitional justice issues, to the ethnic and religious divides that threaten liberal democracy. This book will appeal to political theorists as well as readers in public policy, area studies, law, and across the social sciences. (shrink)

This book provides a novel account of integrity and its relevance to both individual and collective conduct, and analyses a wide range of practical policy problems.

The "German Socrates," Moses Mendelssohn was the most influential Jewish thinker of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. A Berlin celebrity and a major figure in the Enlightenment, revered by Immanuel Kant, Mendelssohn suffered the indignities common to Jews of his time while formulating the philosophical foundations of a modern Judaism suited for a new age. His most influential books included the groundbreaking Jerusalem and a translation of the Bible into German that paved the way for generations of Jews to master (...) the language of the larger culture.Feiner's book is the first that offers a full, human portrait of this fascinating man--uncommonly modest, acutely aware of his task as an intellectual pioneer, shrewd, traditionally Jewish, yet thoroughly conversant with the world around him--providing a vivid sense of Mendelssohn's daily life as well as of his philosophical endeavors. Feiner, a leading scholar of Jewish intellectual history, examines Mendelssohn as father and husband, as a friend, as a tireless advocate for his people, and as an equally indefatigable spokesman for the paramount importance of intellectual independence. (shrink)

Political honors are ubiquitous in public life, whether in the form of public monuments, street names, or national holidays. Yet such honors have received scant attention from normative political theorists. Tackling this gap, I begin by criticizing a desert-based approach to political honors. I then argue that morally appropriate honors are best understood as marking and reinforcing the moral commitments of the collective in whose name they are being awarded. I show how this thesis clarifies and organizes core intuitions regarding (...) a variety of honors, from those commemorating slave-owning founders of the United States to the Nobel Peace Prize. (shrink)

Thomas Pogge has been challenging liberal thinking on global politics, often through critical engagement with John Rawls’ work. Pogge presents both normative and empirical arguments against Rawls: normatively, Rawls’ domestic Theory of Justice and global Law of Peoples are incompatible ideal theories; empirically, LP is too removed from the actual world to guide the foreign policy of liberal societies. My main purpose here is to contest the first, ideal theory criticism in order to direct more attention to the second, non-ideal (...) objection. I argue against Pogge that TJ and LP can be read as coherent, once one employs a Rousseauian rather than Pogge’s economic Kantian reading of TJ. The first two sections present Pogge’s view of TJ and contrast it with a Rousseauian alternative that is less cosmopolitan and economic and much more focused on the democratic and sovereign context of justice as fairness. The third section seeks to refute Pogge’s incoherence arguments, which encompass the identity of the parties to the international original position, their motivations and their decisions. Instead of a conclusion, the last section emphasizes LP’s non-ideal problems, and suggests that insofar as LP is the most robust liberal ideal theory of global politics, its empirical failure indicates the need to shift global justice theorizing even more to the non-ideal realm.Keywords: Rawls; Pogge; global justice; ideal theory; non-ideal theory; cosmopolitanism; statism; Rousseau; Kant; democracy. (shrink)

Wary of quick statist dismissal of their proposals, cosmopolitans have been careful not to associate themselves with a world state. I argue that this caution is mistaken: cosmopolitans should see the vision of a world state as strategically valuable in exposing weaknesses in statist accounts, particularly of the Rawlsian variety. This strategic value follows if the only cogent arguments against a world state belong to non-ideal theory which assumes non-compliance, rather than to ideal theory with its core assumption of full (...) compliance. If our only convincing reasons to reject a world state are non-ideal, then any liberal theory revolving around separate states must itself be considered a non-ideal theory. As a non-ideal theory, a statist law of peoples cannot be presented as an end-state, but is rather a transitional stage. Yet once seen as a transitional theory, the statist “realistic utopia” can no longer dodge the cosmopolitan charge that it is neither sufficiently realistic nor sufficiently utopian. (shrink)

This article discusses an aspect of Hannah Arendt’s treatment of the conflict between the Zionists and the Palestinians that has thus far been overlooked in scholarship: her justification of Zionism through the achievements of the Jewish pioneers in cultivating the land, in contrast to the Palestinians’ failure to do so. The inability of natives to cultivate their land was a familiar argument in the history of colonialism, used to legitimize the colonialists’ right to settle a land and often to displace (...) the natives. How should we understand Arendt’s use of this argument? I show that Arendt’s argument should be understood in the context of, first, the recurrence of this argument in Western political thought and practices. Second, the Zionists’—Arendt included—need of legitimizing Jewish settlements in Palestine. And third, the influence of Arendt’s own political philosophy on her understanding of culture in general, and Palestinian culture in particular. (shrink)

"Ilana and Ari Goldreich set out on an unforettable quest through time ... and learn ... Jewish values in order to save the world from deadly peril" -- p. 4 of cover.

The poet and author Judah Leib Gordon (1830–92) was one of the key figures who promoted the Haskalah (The Jewish Enlightenment) among the large Jewish population in Eastern Europe in the second hal...

Moses Mendelssohn (1729–1786) wrote Jerusalem with his back to the wall. His Jewish identity and liberal outlook were challenged in the public sphere of the German Enlightenment, and this was his last opportunity to write a book that would perpetuate the essence of his faith and his values as the first modern Jewish humanist. The work, which moves between apologetics for his faith and political and religious philosophy was primarily a daring essay that categorically denied the rule of religion and (...) advocated tolerance and freedom of thought. Neither the state nor the church had the right to govern a person’s conscience; and, no less far-reaching and pioneering: these values are consistent with Judaism. In the summer of 1783, seven years after the resounding voice of protest against tyranny and in favor of liberty and equality was heard in the American Declaration of Independence, less than six years before the French Revolution, but only two years and two months before his death, the man who was called the “German Socrates,” a highly prominent figure in the Enlightenment, published one of the fundamental documents in Jewish modernity. (shrink)

In this article, I discuss the way Judith Butler builds on Hannah Arendt’s political thought for her critique of Zionism. While her critique is valuable in many ways, I argue that it also obscures...

When harm is caused by multiple injurers, damages are allocated among the responsible injurers in proportion to their relative responsibility for harm. This Article shows that a proportional allocation of liability between strictly-liable injurers distorts incentives to take precautions. The effects of this distortion depend on the nature of the injurers’ precautions. If precautions are complements, injurers compete for lower liability shares, which results in excessive care-taking. If precautions are substitutes, injurers are afflicted by moral hazard, which gives rise to (...) insufficient care-taking. By illuminating injurers’ strategic incentives, this Article highlights a tension between equity and efficiency under a proportional allocation of liability. (shrink)