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.

This book presents the definitive exposition of 'prospect theory', a compelling alternative to the classical utility theory of choice. Building on the 1982 volume, Judgement Under Uncertainty, this book brings together seminal papers on prospect theory from economists, decision theorists, and psychologists, including the work of the late Amos Tversky, whose contributions are collected here for the first time. While remaining within a rational choice framework, prospect theory delivers more accurate, empirically verified predictions in key test cases, as well as (...) helping to explain many complex, real-world puzzles. In this volume, it is brought to bear on phenomena as diverse as the principles of legal compensation, the equity premium puzzle in financial markets, and the number of hours that New York cab drivers choose to drive on rainy days. Theoretically elegant and empirically robust, this volume shows how prospect theory has matured into a new science of decision making. (shrink)

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.

This article described three heuristics that are employed in making judgements under uncertainty: representativeness, which is usually employed when people are asked to judge the probability that an object or event A belongs to class or process B; availability of instances or scenarios, which is often employed when people are asked to assess the frequency of a class or the plausibility of a particular development; and adjustment from an anchor, which is usually employed in numerical prediction when a relevant value (...) is available. These heuristics are highly economical and usually effective, but they lead to systematic and predictable errors. A better understanding of these heuristics and of the biases to which they lead could improve judgements and decisions in situations of uncertainty. (shrink)

The thirty-five chapters in this book describe various judgmental heuristics and the biases they produce, not only in laboratory experiments but in important...

THE PURPOSE OF OUR LIVES is to undergo a gradual transformation. We are born with a self-centered nature, but we can acquire a nature in which the focus is on the other. Through spiritual work, we can slowly learn to overcome our innate desire to find some form of self-gratification in all we do. Union with God is the result of desiring to give to others with no interest in reward of any kind. This is the essential teaching of the (...) Kabbalah as portrayed in these essays by Baal Hasulam. Rabbi Gottlieb’s commentary adds details on the winding road toward spiritual transformation. (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)

El presente artículo pretende realizaruna crítica a la noción del kosmos griegoentendido como mundo ordenado, puesla evidencia textual en los escritorespresocráticos sólo podría soportar unanoci ón como est a en una época muyposterior a la de la filosofía griega temprana.En l os aut ores gri egos t empranos, elconcepto de kosmos no implica esta idea,como se muestra a través de la revisión delas traducciones erradas de sus fragmentos.Finalmente, se explica como hacer unanueva reinterpretación de sus filosofíasThis paper intends to advance (...) a criticism ofthe notion of Greek Kosmos understood as an orderly world, since textual evidence in the Presocratics could only support a notion like that for a period quite far from theearly Greek philosophy. In the early Greek philosophers, the notion of Kosmos does not convey this idea, as it will be shown througha revision of the wrong translation of their fragments. Finally, it will be explained how to do a new reinterpretation of their philosophies. (shrink)

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