From Belsen to Gaza: The Promise (2011), British and British-Jewish identity

This article discusses Peter Kosminsky’s miniseries The Promise (2011) and investigates the intense public responses it engendered in Britain. The first part of the article explores how the miniseries takes the lead from the liberation of Belsen to engage with issues of British national self-perception. Drawing on the notion of ‘postimperial melancholia’, the article argues that The Promise explores important issues related to Britain’s past and present, in particular the lasting heritage of Empire. The second part engages with the intense reception of the miniseries among opinion makers and the general public, with many critics seeing The Promise as aimed at delegitimising the State of Israel. In thus doing, the article situates the debate within broader discussions on the supposed relationship between anti-Zionism and “new anti-Semitism”, and more specifically discussion of the role of anti-Zionist Jews. The debate around The Promise is a case study for the exploration of two related controversies. The first one pertains to Jewish/non-Jewish relations, in particular regarding the international role of Israel in the twenty-first century. The second one is more specifically infra-Jewish and revolves around the issue of which subjects are legitimate to speak out as Jews and in the name of which values.     

Motivation to Act in Confucianism and Christianity: In Matteo Ricci’s The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義)

The True Meaning of the Lord of Heaven (Tianzhu Shiyi 天主實義) is a Chinese text of the 17th century written by the Italian sinologist and missionary Matteo Ricci. It contains, among other topics, a discussion between a Confucian scholar and a Christian about the motivation to act. For Confucianism a good action should be performed for its own sake, without any thought of future reward. For Christianity it seems that good actions are performed in order to go to Heaven. Ricci argues that human actions are complex. The ultimate motivation for goodness comes from a relation with God. The Confucian scholar claims that actually not all actions need a motive. Sometimes things “just happen.” Also, a good tradition can move people to behave properly. Dealing with topics such as soul, eternal life, causes, descendants, tradition, happiness and proper behavior, this dialogue offers a great insight of the meeting of two great traditions: Confucianism and Christianity.     

A CHARIOT FOR THE SHEKHINAH: Identity and the Ideal Life in Sixteenth-Century Kabbalah

In this paper, I seek to present the range of issues involved in the efforts of sixteenth-century kabbalists to understand the nature of selfhood, and the paths prescribed for the formation of an ideal life. I reflect on the mystical writings of Moshe Cordovero, Eliyahu de Vidas, and     ayyim Vital—probing their conceptions of core identity, the polarity between body and soul, and the ethical guidance for a life well lived. In so doing, I consider the following additional themes, and their relation to the matrix of self-formation and religious identity: reincarnation and rebirth; the virtue of humility and self-effacement; the cultivation of wisdom; ideals of piety and prophetic experience; asceticism; and the spiritual transcendence of desire. In presenting this wide range of constituent themes, I argue that sixteenth-century kabbalists understood the soul to be the ultimate marker of personal identity (nuanced and complicated by the doctrine of reincarnation), and that they formulated a vision of an ideal ethics in which the human being functions as an earthly vessel for the divine presence. What is more, the preparation of that vessel required a degree of humility so extreme that the attainment of ideal personhood ultimately involved the effacement of that very identity.     

Re-reading Anscombe on ‘I’

According to a ‘Straight’ reading of Elizabeth Anscombe’s (1975 Anscombe, E. 1975. “The First Person.” In her Mind and Language, edited by S. Guttenplan, 45–65. Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar]) ‘The First Person’, she holds a radically non-referring view of ‘I’. Specifically, ‘I’ is analogous to the expletive ‘it’ in ‘It’s raining’. I argue that this is not her conclusion. Her substantive view, rather is that if what you mean by ‘reference’ is a certain rich and recherché notion tracing to Frege, then ‘I’ is not a referring term. Her methodological point is that one shouldn’t be ‘bewitched by language’ into thinking that ‘I’, because of its syntax, must exhibit ‘reference’ in this sense.     

Bunched sequential information

It is known that the logic BI of bunched implications is a logic of resources. Many studies have reported on the applications of BI to computer science. In this paper, an extension BIS of BI by adding a sequence modal operator is introduced and studied in order to formalize more fine-grained resource-sensitive reasoning. By the sequence modal operator of BIS, we can appropriately express “sequential information” in resource-sensitive reasoning. A Gentzen-type sequent calculus SBIS for BIS is introduced, and the cut-elimination and decidability theorems for SBIS are proved. An extension of the Grothendieck topological semantics for BI is introduced for BIS, and the completeness theorem with respect to this semantics is proved. The cut-elimination, decidability and completeness theorems for SBIS and BIS are proved using some theorems for embedding BIS into BI.     

Psychopathic traits of business and psychology students and their relationship to academic success

The notion that high levels of psychopathic trait leads to career success in the business sector has become a popular point of theorising in recent years, with research providing support for the alleged overrepresentation of psychopathy in the financial sector, and the existence of a relationship between psychopathy and professional success. A cross-sectional design was employed to compare psychopathy scores of business and psychology students, as well as to examine the psychopathy-academic success relationship. Participates were 263 participants recruited from a UK university. Results revealed greater psychopathic traits in business students relative to psychology students on all four factors of psychopathy. Furthermore, hierarchical multiple regression indicated that the four psychopathy factors, gender, age, study hours, and course explain 14% of variance in grade outcome. Two variables made unique statistic contributions to the model with antisocial behaviour and gender (male) negatively related to grade outcome. Theoretical and practical implications of our findings are discussed.     

A test of the X-linked genetic hypothesis for sex differences on Piaget's water-level task

Data from seven studies involving 849 high school and college students were used to test the recessive X-linked genetic model prediction that the square of the proportion of men who perform accurately on the water-level task is equal to the proportion of women who perform accurately. Goodness-of-fit tests showed that this prediction was confirmed for each sample. A model with a single estimate of gene frequency accounted for all the data when a classification error parameter was incorporated into the X-linked model. In both models the gene frequency parameter was about $\text{2}\text{3}$.