The Rolling 50s (and More): Cars and Life Satisfaction Among Seniors Across Europe

Applied Research in Quality of Life - Cars represent a valuable real asset that most individuals use on a daily basis. Although cars are a form of material prosperity like income and other forms of...     

Isaac de Castellón: poet, kabbalist, communal combatant

In the fourth decade of the thirteenth century a long-simmering revolt erupted in Barcelona and surrounding communities. It pitted the nesi?im (literally: princes), who claimed communal authority as an aristocratic prerogative and enforced it through their influence at the royal court, against a scholarly elite that included major figures such as Na?manides and Jonah Gerondi. The political conflict intertwined with two wider religious disputes: the Maimonidean controversy of the 1230s and the debate over the legitimacy of kabbalah. The rebels, who included kabbalists and opponents of philosophical rationalism gained the support of James I and thus prevailed. One figure mentioned as a leader of the revolt, “the poet Rabbi Isaac Castellón,” has until now remained obscure. The article identifies him with a poet of the same name, mentioned as the author of a liturgical poem included in the fourteenth-century Barcelona Haggadah. Close reading shows it to be skillfully wrought, and to make creative use of Andalusian poetic tradition and technique. Castellón transcribes the Neoplatonic contrast between God’s hidden and revealed aspects into a kabbalistic key, using a kabbalistic symbol, “the tip of the yod,” for Keter, the highest sefirah. The conclusion of the poem appears to assert that, contrary to the claims of its critics, the kabbalistic doctrine of the sefirot is consistent with God’s absolute unity. The poem’s adoption as a prelude to the Shema‘ in the communal service may have been a consequence of the victory of the Barcelona rebels.     

What Do People Think About the Risks of Driving? Implications for Traffic Safety Interventions1

Two studies found that people generally think of themselves as better than average drivers. Both older and younger people rated themselves slightly better than peers, with the younger people rating their peers as the worst drivers but rating themselves as if they did not belong to this group. University students rated their peers as being more similar to themselves than did nonuniversity younger people. A factor analysis found five dimensions along which people thought about driving risks: environmental and road conditions, unexpected events, driver problems, necessary or unavoidable driving risks, and voluntary driving risks. Speeding was thought of in two ways, as both an unavoidable driving risk and as a voluntary risk. Differences were found between general and specific questions, and a theoretical framework for exploring these in future research was proposed predicts differences between a situational or dispositional focus. The implications of the results for traffic safety interventions were drawn out, and specific recommendations, made for targeting such interventions.     

L'avenir de l'approche par élaboration de règles

The goal of this study is the elaboration of a computerized diagnostic instrument based on Siegler's rule-assessment approach for assessing the acquisition of the probability quantification scheme in subjects aged 6–18 years. Three versions of the test were used. Version 1 was Siegler's original version (four types of problems and four rules). In version 2 five new rules were added; version 3 contained the five new rules plus eleven types of problems. Results show that version 1 allows the classification of only 50% of subjects; version 2, 60%; and version 3, 70%. Despite improved versions, some weaknesses remain, the most important one being that it is still impossible to evaluate intra-individual variability. Aware of these limits, Siegler has reassigned his model to a local model of problem solving, and suggests a developmental model of information processing inspired by a Darwinian model of variation and strategy selection. The authors hypothesize that computer engineering could not only reaffirm the general status of the rule-assessment approach, but could also allow consideration of intra-individual variability.     

Hussearle's Representationalism and the “hypothesis of the Background”

John Searle's hypothesis of the Background seems to conflict with his initial representationalism according to which each Intentional state contains a particular content that determines its conditions of satisfaction. In Section I of this essay I expose Searle's initial theory of Intentionality and relate it to Edmund Husserl's earlier phenomenology. In Section II I make it clear that Searle's introduction of the notion of Network, though indispensable, does not, by itself, force us to modify that initial theory. However, a comparison of this notion to the notion of horizon from Husserl's later phenomenology and an interpretation of Husserl's conception of the determinable X as providing a solution to the problem of perceptual misidentification lead me to conclude that in his discussion of 'twin examples' Searle had better modified his initial theory. Finally, I critically examine Searle's claim that anyone who tries seriously to follow out the threads in the Network will eventually reach a bedrock of non-Intentional capacities. In Section III I show in detail, partly in a rather Husserlian vein, that Searle's four official arguments for the Background thesis, though containing some very valuable contributions to a theory of linguistic skills, are not convincing at all if they are to be understood as going beyond the scope of (Hus)Searle's 'content-cum-Network' picture of Intentionality. The upshot of these considerations is that the Background thesis should be read as a thesis concerning the causal neurophysiological preconditions of human Intentionality rather than concerning the logical properties of Intentional states in general. Recently Searle himself has come to the same result, but he does not say for which reasons. The present essay makes it clear why Searle just had to arrive at this important result.