Remaking a Kabbalist: Manuscript and Print Cultures in Early Modern Italy

Jewish History - The dissemination of Safedian Kabbalah in late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Italy represents a critical turning point in the history of modern Kabbalah. Several...     

Early morphological effects in reading: Evidence from parafoveal preview benefit in Hebrew

Hebrew words are composed of two interwoven morphemes: a triconsonantal root and a word pattern. We examined the role of the root morpheme in word identification by assessing the benefit of presentation of a parafoveal preview word derived from the same root as a target word. Although the letter information of the preview was not consciously perceived, a preview of a word derived from the same root morpheme as the foveal target word facilitated eye-movement measures of first-pass reading (i.e.,first fixation and gaze duration). These results are the first to demonstrate early morphological effects in the context of sentence reading in which no external task is imposed on the reader, and converge with previous findings of morphemic priming in Hebrew using the masked priming paradigm, and morphemic parafoveal preview benefit effects in a single-word identification task.     

近代早期鼠疫在英国消退原因探析

关于鼠疫在近代早期西欧消退的原因,学界观点纷呈,众说不一.从传染病流行规律看,鼠疫的消退与其滋生环境、传播途径被改变有很大关系,而这些非疾病本身所能为,只能是人类活动干预的结果.以英国为例,来从防疫活动、观念革新等方面入手,以透视近代早期西欧社会的主观努力在推动鼠疫消退方面的积极作用.     

Cambridge University versus Hebrew University: The impact of letter transposition on reading English and Hebrew

Is reading similarly affected by letter transposition in all alphabetic orthographies? “The Cambridge University effect,” demonstrating that jumbled letters have little effect on reading, was examined using rapid serial visual presentation (RSVP) in English and in Hebrew. Hebrew-English bilinguals were presented sentences in both languages containing words with transposed letters. Sentences were presented rapidly on the screen word by word, and participants had to reproduce the sequence of words perceived. We found a marked difference in the effect of transpositions in the two languages. In English, transpositions had little effect on performance, whereas in Hebrew, performance deteriorated dramatically for words with transposed letters. The differential effects of transposition are accounted for by the difference in lexical organization in Hebrew and in English, suggesting that models of reading in alphabetic orthographies may be language specific.     

Human Conception in Antiquity: The Hebrew Bible in Context

Abstract

This article explores ideas concerning human conception as reflected in the Hebrew Bible in particular. After reviewing above all biological texts from ancient Indian, Greek and Roman sources, the various clues as to how human conception may have been understood in the ancient Hebrew context are thoroughly investigated. The notion that Aristotelian ideas of preformationism and pneuma inform the Hebrew Bible is refuted. Instead, both divine and female contributions to conception appear to be more prominent.     

Recovering Early Modern Women Writers

Feminist work in the history of philosophy has been going on for several decades. Some scholars have focused on the ways philosophical concepts are themselves gendered. Others have recovered women writers who were well known in their own time but forgotten in ours, while still others have firmly placed into a philosophical context the works of women writers long celebrated within other disciplines in the humanities. The recovery of women writers has challenged the myth that there are no women in the history of philosophy, but it has not eradicated it. What, we may ask, is impeding our progress? This paper argues that so often we treat early modern women philosophers’ texts in ways that are different from, or inconsistent with, the explicit commitments of the analytic tradition, and in so doing, we may be triggering our audiences to reject these women as philosophers, and their texts as philosophical. Moreover, this is the case despite our intention to achieve precisely the opposite effect.