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11The Tragic Paradox of Political ZionismTelos: Critical Theory of the Contemporary 2020 (192): 29-39. 2020.
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126Bossy matrons and forced marriages: Talmudic confrontationalism and its philosophical significanceOpen Philosophy 3 (1): 335-348. 2020.This article introduces the confrontational theology of the rabbinic literature of late antiquity by means of a well-known, yet ill-understood legend. It goes on to argue that Talmudic confrontationalism comes coupled with an insistent dialogism that, unlike any other major human undertaking, displays a profound awareness of the indispensable role of external normative critique in the process of changing one’s mind.
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407The Talmudist Enlightenment: Talmudic Judaism’s Confrontational Rational TheologyEuropean Journal for Philosophy of Religion 12 (2): 37-63. 2020.Robert Brandom's "The Pragmatist Enlightenment" describes the advent of American pragmatism as signaling a sea-change in our understanding of human reason away from the top-down Euclidian models of reasoning, warrant and knowledge inspired by the physical sciences, toward the far more bottom-up, narrative, inherently fallible and dialogical forms of reasoning of the life and human sciences. It is against this backdrop that Talmudic Judaism emerges not only as an early anticipation of the pragmat…Read more
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492The Making of Peacocks Treatise on Algebra: A Case of Creative IndecisionArchive for History of Exact Sciences 54 (2): 137-179. 1999.A study of the making of George Peacock's highly influential, yet disturbingly split, 1830 account of algebra as an entanglement of two separate undertakings: arithmetical and symbolical or formal.
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33Creatively Undecided: Toward a History and Philosophy of Scientific AgencyUniversity of Chicago Press. 2017.For many, the two key thinkers about science in the twentieth century are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper, and one of the key questions in contemplating science is how to make sense of theory change. In Creatively Undecided, philosopher Menachem Fisch defends a new way to make sense of the rationality of scientific revolutions. He argues, loosely following Kuhn, for a strong notion of the framework dependency of all scientific practice, while at the same time he shows how such frameworks can be deem…Read more
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286Essay review of Y. Gingras, Science and Religion: An Impossible Dialogue, Polity Press, 2017.
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75Whewell's Consilience of Inductions–An EvaluationPhilosophy of Science 52 (2): 239-255. 1985.The paper attempts to elucidate and evaluate William Whewell's notion of a "consilience of inductions." In section I Whewellian consilience is defined and shown to differ considerably from what latter-day writers talk about when they use the term. In section II a primary analysis of consilience is shown to yield two types of consilient processes, one in which one of the lower-level laws undergoes a conceptual change (the case aptly discussed in Butts [1977]), and one in which the explanatory the…Read more
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74Ein Blick vorwärts in die Vergangenheit: Ein Fall für den historischen NominalismusDeutsche Zeitschrift für Philosophie 40 (11): 1279-1294. 1992.
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111. Antithetical KnowledgeIn Menachem Fisch & Simon Schaffer (eds.), William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, Clarendon Press. pp. 289. 1991.
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31‘The emergency which has arrived’: the problematic history of nineteenth-century British algebra – a programmatic outlineBritish Journal for the History of Science 27 (3): 247-276. 1994.More than any other aspect of the Second Scientific Revolution, the remarkable revitalization or British mathematics and mathematical physics during the first half of the nineteenth century is perhaps the most deserving of the name. While the newly constituted sciences of biology and geology were undergoing their first revolution, as it were, the reform of British mathematics was truly and self-consciously the story of a second coming of age. ‘Discovered by Fermat, cocinnated and rendered analyt…Read more
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54Hempel's ravens, the natural classification of hypotheses and the growth of knowledgeErkenntnis 21 (1). 1984.
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74Factuality without Realism: Normativity and the Davidsonian Approach to MeaningSouthern Journal of Philosophy 43 (4): 505-530. 2005.
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21William Whewell: A Composite Portrait (edited book)Clarendon Press. 1991.William Whewell was a giant of Victorian intellectual culture. His influence, whether recognized or forgotten, is palpable in areas as diverse as moral philosophy, mineralogy, architecture, the politics of education, physics, engineering, and theology. Recent studies of the place of the sciences in nineteenth-century Britain have repeatedly indicated the significance of Whewell's sweeping and critical proposals for a reformed account of scientific knowledge and moral values. However, until now t…Read more
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7Ethical Diversity, Tolerance, and the Problem of Sovereignty: A Jewish PerspectiveIn Richard Madsen & Tracy B. Strong (eds.), The Many and the One: Religious and Secular Perspectives on Ethical Pluralism in the Modern World, Princeton University Press. pp. 195-218. 2009.
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A philosopher's coming of age: A study in erotetic intellectual historyIn Menachem Fisch & Simon Schaffer (eds.), William Whewell: A Composite Portrait, Clarendon Press. pp. 31--66. 1991.
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30Taking the Linguistic Turn SeriouslyThe European Legacy 13 (5): 605-622. 2008.Science studies the world, but does not include itself in it. The task of systematically studying science falls to the humanities. The problem is that philosophers who take recent developments in philosophy seriously are forced to deny any credence to the self-image of science as a steadily progressive, self-critical enterprise, while philosophers who take what scientists do and feel more seriously, are forced to ignore some of the most profound latter-day findings of philosophy. What makes this…Read more
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34Necessary and contingent truth in William Whewell's antithetical theory of knowledgeStudies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 16 (4): 275-314. 1984.
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7Defining Science: William Whewell, Natural Knowledge, and Public Debate in Early Victorian Britain by Richard Yeo (review)Isis 85 706-707. 1994.
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536Through Thick and Thin: A New Defense of Cultural RelativismSouthern Journal of Philosophy 42 (1): 1-24. 2004.Some relativists deny that moral discourse is factual. According to them, our ethical commitments are to be explained by appealing to noncognitive mental states like desires, rather than to beliefs in some independent moral facts. Indeed, the package antirealism (there are no moral properties) & noncognitivism (the source of moral commitments is noncognitive) seems to be implicit in Lewis’s and Harman’s relativism. But to many philosophers this package seems to be unattractive. Our task in this …Read more
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265Trouble-Shooting Creativity: A Critical Appraisal of David Bohm and F. David Peat's "Science Order & Creativity"History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 16 (1). 1994.The problems divulged, analyzed and allegedly solved in Science, Order & Creativity are not scientific problems. They attest to a fundamental failure of science but not to scientific failure per se. Bohm and Peat's meta-scientific undertaking cannot afford, therefore, to remain negative. However, neither science itself nor current professional philosophy are capable of the radical positive rethinking required, in their view, in order to restore and ensure scientific creativity.
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1Berakhot 19b: The Bavli's Paradigm of Confrontational DiscourseJournal of Textual Reasoning 4 (2). 2006.
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14The View From Within: Normativity and the Limits of Self-CriticismUniversity of Notre Dame Press. 2011.__The View from Within_ _examines the character of reason and the ability of an individual to effectively distance himself from the normative framework in which he functions in order to be self-critical and innovative. To accomplish this task, Menachem Fisch and Yitzhak Benbaji critically employ or reject the recent writings of Brandom, Friedman, Frankfurt, Walzer, Davidson, Williams, Habermas, Rorty, and McDowell to offer a fundamental analysis of the character of reason and the problem of rela…Read more
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1Rational Rabbis: Its Project and ArgumentJournal of Textual Reasoning 4 (2). 2006.0. Rational Rabbis aspires to make two main points, one philosophical and contemporary, the other interpretative and historical. The book’s philosophical undertaking, presented in Part I, is to develop a central insight of Karl Popper’s into a more fuller theory of rational endeavor. The book’s interpretative and main undertaking, presented in Part II, is to argue (a) that the talmudic literature bears clear witness to a tannaitic view of humanly possible intellectual achievement intriguingly ak…Read more
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43Science Naturalized, Science Denatured: An Evaluation of Ronald Giere's Cognitivist Approach to Explaining ScienceHistory and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 13 (2). 1991.Ronald Giere and others aspire to 'naturalize science' by examining scientific activity as they would any other natural phenomenon — scientifically. Giere aims to fashion a theory of science that is naturalistic, realistic, and evolutionary, and to thus carve for himself a niche between foundationalist philosophies of science (positing abstract criteria of rationality) on the one hand, and relativist sociologies of science on the other. Giere's approach is appealing because it allows that scienc…Read more
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Trouble-Shooting Creativity: A Critical Appraisal of David Bohm and F. David Peat's' Science Orders & Creativity'. A review of Science Order & Creativity (review)History and Philosophy of the Life Sciences 16 (1): 141-154. 1994.
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Tel Aviv UniversityThe Cohn Institute For History And Philosophy of Science And IdeasRetired faculty
Ramat Aviv, Tel Aviv, Israel
Areas of Interest
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