_ Source: _Volume 26, Issue 1, pp 34 - 66 During his final years, R. Nahman of Bratslav endeavored to find a solution for the paradox of unrealized messiahs. His solution was outlined in his dream about birds in December 1806, on the Sabbath of _Parashat Va-yeḥi_. This dream was influenced by his reading of a story told in the _Zohar, Parashat Va-yeḥi_, of a “vision of birds” of R. Yehudah, a disciple of R. Shimon bar Yohai, that exemplifies (...) the crisis experienced by the circle of disciples of R. Shimon following his death. The essay elaborates on the connections between the dream and the _Zohar_ story and their influence on R. Nahman’s messianic endeavor. (shrink)

ḥeleḳ 1. - Elul, Tishre - Adar -- ḥeleḳ 2. Nisan-Av.

Over the last two decades, social scientists across disciplines have been researching how value is extracted and governed in the reproductive bioeconomy, which broadly refers to the various ways reproductive tissues, bodies, services, customers, workers, and data are inserted into capitalist modes of accumulation. While many of these studies are empirically grounded in single country–based analyses, this paper proposes an integrative political economy framework, structured around the concept of “global fertility chains.” The latter articulates the reproductive bioeconomy as a nexus (...) of intraconnected practices, operations, and transactions between enterprises, states, and households across the globe, through which reproductive services and commodities are produced, distributed, and consumed. Employing a diffractive reading of the literature on commodity chains and care chains, this unified approach scrutinizes the coproduction of value, biology, and technoscience and their governance mechanisms in the accumulation of capital by taking into account the unevenly developed geographies of global fertility chains, their reliance on women’s waged and unwaged reproductive labor, and the networked role of multiple actors at multiple scales without losing sight of the constitutive role of national states in creating demand, organizing supply, and accommodating the distribution of surplus value. We empirically ground this integrative political economy approach of the reproductive bioeconomy through collaborative, multisited fieldwork on transnational reproduction networks in Israel/palestine, Romania, Georgia, and Spain. (shrink)

This article presents qualitative research conducted in an Israeli ova `extraction' clinic in Romania. Following on from a piece written by Jyotsna Gupta and published in this journal in February 2006, this article asks what kinds of feminist alliances can or should be made in the arena of reproductive technologies. In conversation with Gupta, the author asks whether `an ethic of universal human dignity' is possible or desirable. This article looks to the voices of Romanian egg sellers themselves as a (...) source of theoretical and political direction for transnational feminists who try to think about responses to reproductive technologies. (shrink)

In a Recent article [9], Alexander Rosenberg attacks the “manipulative” view of causation as being unilluminating and as being beset with difficulties. As a proponent of that view [3], I have felt it necessary to take up cudgels in its defence.Rosenberg's criticisms are directed at Gasking's version of this view [5]. Gasking's recipe for causation is, “one says ‘A causes B’ in cases where one could produce an event of the A sort as a means to producing one of the (...) B sort”. Here it is taken for granted that we have general manipulative techniques for producing events of the A sort and that this is implicitly assumed when one speaks of A as a cause. There is one qualification to this formula for causes which arises from the necessity for individuating processes, namely, that, for A to be the cause of B, it must not always lead to B, but only in special cases. (shrink)

We consider the mind-dependence or independence of the "now," of "becoming," and of "time's arrow," by considering the various senses in which these notions might be mind-dependent or not. These matters cannot be sensibly discussed without taking a stand regarding criteria of "reality." Proceeding from a basically phenomenalist position we conclude that merely to differentiate between appearance and reality is implicitly to assume a directed flow of time. We discuss the relationship between phenomenological and physical time and their possible asymmetries. (...) We find that physical time acquires meaning only through phenomenological time, and that phenomenological time is fundamentally asymmetric. This still leaves room for the question: Is there anything in physical time which reflects the fact that it, to be meaningful, must be applied asymmetrically? The relevance of relativity theory to this question is discussed. (shrink)

מנושאי הספר: האדם ויוצרו, האדם והחברה, האדם וחייו.

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years (...) before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism. (shrink)

Avraham Yitzhaq Ha-Cohen Kook (1865-1935) stands as a colossal figure of modern Jewish history and thought. Jurist, mystic, poet, theologian, communal leader, founder of the modern Chief Rabbinate and still the defining thinker of Religious Zionism, he is indispensable for understanding modern Jewish thought, the contemporary State of Israel, and the most fundamental interactions of religion, nationalism, ethics and spirituality. Despite countless studies of him, almost no full-fledged intellectual biography of him exists in any language. This study of the years (...) before his momentous move to Jaffa in 1904, drawing on little-known works, including recently published manuscripts, begins to fill that gap. It traces his life and times in the remarkably intense Rabbinic intellectual milieu of late nineteenth-century Eastern Europe, and his path from a profound, regularly rationalist traditionalism, towards a dynamic theology and spiritual practice weaving together Kabbalah, philosophy, universal ethics, and romantic mysticism. (shrink)

Some aspects of the problem of measurement in quantum theory are treated. We stress that the problem is both physical and conceptual, that the physical problem has been solved and the conceptual one is inherent in quantum theory. We also deal with some remarks made by Wigner concerning physics and the explanation of life, and present alternative positions on the mind-matter relationship within a deterministic framework, as we see them.

Is the Copenhagen interpretation really a subjective one? What is the special role that observations play in quantum theory? Is there really something peculiar about the projection postulate? Why does the Copenhagenist treat probabilities as properties of individual systems? Is there a measurement problem, and if so, can itin principle be solved within the framework of quantum theory? We offer aconceptual treatment of the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics in which these questions are answered and contrast it with another interpretation (...) which we call Popperism. The interpretations differ in their choice of a state description, from which it follows that they will offer a different account of the relation of measurements to states and different ways of describing quantum theory. But the two descriptions are equally consistent and physically completely equivalent. (shrink)

ha-Derekh la-ʻaliyah -- Bi-shevile ha-ʻavodah -- Dorshe H.

We rebut the objections to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics presented by Park [9,10], Margenau [10], and Popper [11]. It seems to us that these authors, having adopted different interpretations of quantum mechanics, have been unable to grasp the perspective of the Copenhagenist. They therefore miss the points which the Copenhagenist is making when he: accords a special status to observations in quantum theory; attributes a state vector to an individual system; places restrictions on the simultaneous measurability of non-commuting (...) observables; hesitates to use his measurements for retrodictions. In our opinion, the arguments of the above authors reflect their incomprehension of Copenhagenism. Elsewhere [5,6] we have discussed two alternative interpretations of quantum mechanics which we have called Copenhagenism and Popperism. We have there shown how the dispute between the schools stems from disparate uses of the word ‘state’. We continue the discussion here within the context of the above points and show how these disparate notions of state are related to diverse notions of ‘behaviour’. (shrink)

First Published in 1984. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Nanomedicine offers remarkable options for new therapeutic avenues. As methods in nanomedicine advance, ethical questions conjunctly arise. Nanomedicine is an exceptional niche in several aspects as it reflects risks and uncertainties not encountered in other areas of medical research or practice. Nanomedicine partially overlaps, partially interlocks and partially exceeds other medical disciplines. Some interpreters agree that advances in nanotechnology may pose varied ethical challenges, whilst others argue that these challenges are not new and that nanotechnology basically echoes recurrent bioethical dilemmas. (...) The purpose of this article is to discuss some of the ethical issues related to nanomedicine and to reflect on the question whether nanomedicine generates ethical challenges of new and unique nature. Such a determination should have implications on regulatory processes and professional conducts and protocols in the future. (shrink)

This article utilises feminist technoscience studies’ notions of bodily ‘materialisation’ and ‘ontological choreographies’, offering a cyborg feminist account of ‘bioavailability’ as embodied becomings, rather than a fixed ontological state of being. Drawn from 2 years’ ethnographic study in in vitro fertilisation clinics in Spain with migrant women who provided eggs to the cross-border in vitro fertilisation industry, this work explores how global understandings of race and inequalities, clinical practices and women’s own emotional and physical labours collectively produce bioavailability. Through examples (...) from observations and interviews in in vitro fertilisation clinics, we examined women’s embodied stories to understand the ways in which bioavailability becomes. The article demonstrates a novel way in which to think about ‘bioavailability’, a concept which has already been of enormous use to the social sciences since its introduction by Lawrence Cohen. We examine recent configurations of bodily extraction in the reproduction–migration nexus that help us rethink the concept of bioavailability. (shrink)