H Kim

Twentieth century continental thinkers such as Bergson, Levinas and Jonas have brought fresh and renewed attentions to Jewish ethics, yet it still remains fairly low profile in the Anglophone academic world. This collection of critical essays brings together the work of established and up-and-coming scholars from Israel, the United States, and around the world on the topic of Jewish religious and philosophical ethics. The chapters are broken into three main sections - Rabbinics, Philosophy, and Contemporary Challenges. The authors address, using a variety of research strategies, the work of both major and lesser-known figures in historical Jewish religious and philosophical traditions. The book discusses a wide variety of topics related to Jewish ethics, including "ethics and the Mishnah," "Afro Jewish ethics," "Jewish historiographical ethics," as well as the conceptual/philosophical foundations of the law and virtues in the work of Martin Buber, Hermann Cohen, and Baruch Spinoza.The volume closes with four contributions on present-day frontiers in Jewish ethics. As the first book to focus on the nature, scope and ramifications of the Jewish ethics at work in religious and philosophical contexts, this book will be of great interest to anyone studying Jewish Studies, Philosophy and Religion.

In this dissertation, I discuss how each individual's mental world is represented and shared with others. We understand and use a concept or the meaning of a general term to identify the objects falling under the term. There are two distinct approaches to research on the problems of concepts and meaning: the psychological approach and the formal approach. My major concern is to consider the possibility of reconciling these two different approaches, and for this I propose a psychologically plausible formal framework of conceptualization. ;Within the proposed framework I develop a theory-based account of concepts and explain how an agent activates a perspective in response to a situation in which reasoning using a concept is called for. Theories are represented as sets of facts and rules, both strict and defeasible and each theory is organized in a coherent perspective which stands for an agent's mental state or an agent's model of another agent's perspective. ;In my analysis of perspectival representation, I discuss how my notion of perspective is related to other mental phenomena such as consciousness and intentionality. Through a critique of Searle, I clarify some important properties of mental processes. Examining his connection principle and his notions of consciousness and intentionality, I augment his notion of Background, arguing that my notion of perspective replaces the Background in Searle's sense. ;My computational and philosophical account of perspectives and theories withstands evaluation from the empirical point of view represented by recent psychological studies. This investigation initiates a new research program in psychology, the study of perspectival cognitive processes. My notion of perspectival cognitive process is explained in the context of recent neuropsychological models suggesting a new way to interpret my notion of deep-level perspectival representation. Furthermore, Mangan's functional analysis of fringe phenomena and Baars's Global Workspace theory can be expanded to take into account how perspectival processes bridge the gap between conscious and unconscious processes

This paper discusses how we understand and use a concept or the meaningof a general term to identify the objects falling under the term. There aretwo distinct approaches to research on the problems of concepts and meaningthe psychological approach and the formal (or logical) approach. My majorconcern is to consider the possibility of reconciling these two differentapproaches, and for this I propose to build a psychologically plausibleformal system of conceptualization. That is, I will develop a theory-basedaccount of concepts and propose an explanation of how an agent activates aperspective (which consists of theories) in response to a situation in whichreasoning using a concept is called for. Theories are represented as sets offacts and rules, both strict and defeasible. Each theory is organized in acoherent perspective which stands for an agent's mental state or an agent'smodel of another agent's perspective. Perspectives are organized intohierarchies and the theory for a concept in one perspective may defeat thetheory for the same concept in another perspective. Which perspective issuperior is context-dependent.