The Sparks of Randomness

by Atlan, Henri; Schramm, Lenn J.

• ISBN13: 9780804761352
• ISBN10: 0804761353
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2013-01-09
• Publisher: Stanford Univ Pr

Summary

In this second volume of The Sparks of Randomness, Henri Atlan pursues his investigation of human life, which he grounds in a distinctive intermingling of the biological and cognitive sciences and traditions of Jewish thought. The Atheism of Scriptureoffers up a paradox: its audacious thesis is that the Word or revealed scripture can be better understood without God. It must be decrypted or analyzed atheistically, that is, not as divine revelation, but in and of itself. The first part of the book addresses contemporary science. It puts the evolution of ideas about life and knowledge as conceived by today's biological and cognitive sciences into perspective and shows how the genealogy of ethics must be approached in a new way. The second part takes up this challenge by putting classical philosophy in dialogue with the Talmud and the Kabbalah to advance a non-dualistic anthropology of the body and the mind.

Author Biography

Henri Atlan is Professor Emeritus of Biophysics and Director of the Human Biology Research Center at Hadassah University Hospital in Jerusalem and Director of Studies at the EHESS in Paris. His honorific titles include the French Legion of Honor, the French Order of Arts and Letters, and the French National Order of Merit.

Table of Contents

Translator's Introduction	p. xv
Preface	p. xxi
Zoön and Bios
Living and Knowing: Social Images and Scholarly Discourses	p. 3
Differences and Continuity	p. 11
Toward a Genealogy of Ethics	p. 17
Pleasure and Pain: The First Level of Ethics	p. 17
The Myth of Adam's Fall and "True Knowledge of Good and Evil"	p. 21
The Concerns of Moral Philosophy	p. 22
From the First Level to the Second Level	p. 30
The Third Level: Theoretical Deduction or Argumentation Genealogy	p. 32
Modified States of Consciousness and the Sacred	p. 36
Argumentation Ethics and Underdetermination	p. 39
The Morality of Indignation	p. 43
A Schematic Representation	p. 45
The Subject and Time
A Natural Subject in the Fourteenth Century?
Hasdai Crescas on Determinism and Responsibility	p. 49
Return of the Subject or Final Death? A Third Term	p. 49
Hasdai Crescas, Determinism, and Freedom	p. 54
Determined but Responsible	p. 63
A Priori Responsibility and Factum Responsibility	p. 66
"Subject of" and "Subject to"	p. 71
Crescas and Spinoza: "God's Joy"	p. 74
Reality, Perfection, and "Glory"	p. 78
"By Reality and Perfection I Understand the Same Thing"	p. 78
Reality as Perfection and Perfection as a Model	p. 78
Wisdom and Perfection	p. 87
Toward Acquiescence and Joy: Provisional Morality and Habit	p. 95
Acquiescence and "Gloria"	p. 99
Human Dignity	p. 103
"Glory"	p. 105
Gloria/Kavod in Scripture and in Spinoza	p. 105
Human Perfection according to Maimonides	p. 108
Revisiting Gloria/Kavod in the Sacred Books, according to Spinoza's Ethics	p. 112
The Third Kind of Knowledge	p. 117
Wisdom(s)	p. 119
The God of Persons and the From of the Human Body	p. 125
Who or What?	p. 125
The Form	p. 127
The Human Body, the Subject of the Rights of Man	p. 134
The Problems of Limits at the Start and End of Human Life	p. 135
The Pragmatism of Talmudic Law	p. 138
"I" Is the Tetragrammaton	p. 141
The God of the Philosophers, and the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob	p. 144
The Unique Person and His or Her God	p. 147
The Voices of Prophecy Reflected on Themselves	p. 152
An Absolute Singular?	p. 155
What Am I?	p. 156
Idolatry Does Not Have to Be Pagan	p. 162
The Radical Monism of Body and Mind
A Spinozist Perspective on Evolution and the Theory of Action: from Analytic Philosophy to Spinoza	p. 167
Immanent Causality and Temporal Evolution	p. 167
Spinoza's Physics and Spinoza's Animism	p. 171
The Synthetic Identity of Properties	p. 176
Synthetic Identity, Referential Opacity, and the Underdetermination of Theories	p. 177
Action and Perception: The Anomalous Monism of Donald Davidson	p. 180
Action and Perception in the Light of Spinoza's Monism	p. 185
The Analogy with Physical Magnitudes	p. 188
Functional Self-Organization	p. 190
Moral Judgment	p. 193
Some Astonishing Neurophysiological Findings	p. 195
Intentional Self-Organization: Toward a Physical Theory of Intentionality	p. 197
Intention as Ex Nihilio Creation?	p. 197
Self-Organization Is Not an Ex Nihilo Causa Sui	p. 200
Is a Physical Theory of Intentionality Possible?	p. 203
Physical and Chemical Reductionism and Phenomenological Reduction	p. 204
Meaningless Complexity in the Information Sciences	p. 205
"Sophistication" as a Measurement of Meaningful Complexity	p. 210
Intentional Self-Organization	p. 212
The Origin of Goals and the Types of Self-Organization	p. 212
The Transformation of a Causal Sequence into a Procedure	p. 214
A Non-Intentional Model of Intentional Behavior	p. 215
Time Reversal	p. 215
A Satisfaction Function and Its Origin	p. 216
A Non-Intentional Model of Intentional Attitudes	p. 218
Consciousness-Memory and Unconscious Self-Organization	p. 219
Infinite Sophistication	p. 220
Provisional Conclusions	p. 224
Action and Perception	p. 224
The Underdetermination of Theories and Intersubjectivity	p. 225
Modeling the Models? The Transcendental Nature of Logic and Ethics	p. 226
Reason and Common Notions	p. 227
Time and Eternity
Statistics and Temporality	p. 231
The Use and Misuse of Statistics and Probability: A Brief Review	p. 231
Misinterpretations in Medicine and Biology	p. 232
Correlation and Causation	p. 236
Retrospective and Prospective Studies	p. 236
Correlation (Strong or Weak) Does Not Mean Causality	p. 238
The Analysis of Variance and the Endless Debate about the Innate versus the Acquired	p. 240
Heritability Is Not a Measure of Genetic Influence	p. 241
The Hypothesis of Additivity	p. 242
Paradoxes of the Possible and Probabilities: Time versus Eternity	p. 244
The Monty Hall Problem, or Marilyn and the Goats	p. 244
Fermat's Strictures and Pascal's "Mistakes": Equal Odds When Throwing Dice	p. 248
Beliefs and Waters	p. 254
Memory of Ritual, Metaphor of Fertilization	p. 257
To Remember and Not Forget	p. 257
Generations	p. 260
Past and Future: The Conversive Vav	p. 261
The Origins	p. 263
New Years, Memory, and Fertilization	p. 267
The Time of Ritual: Conceiving a Memory	p. 269
"The Vision and Riddle" … that "the Mouth Cannot Utter and the Ear Cannot Hear"	p. 270
Underground History or Carnival?	p. 273
The Letter of the Spirit
The So-Called Chosen People …	p. 279
A False Start: The Antisemitic Question	p. 279
The Treason of Words and Their Improper Usage	p. 282
What Does the Bible Say?	p. 285
A Chosen People Like All the Others	p. 287
There Is Nothing Special about the Essence of the People of Israel	p. 290
Creating "Chosen Souls"	p. 292
Understanding Another Imaginary	p. 294
Where Is the Confusion?	p. 297
The Election of "the Smallest of Peoples"	p. 298
"Atheist" Theologies	p. 300
The Tribe and the Humanity in Each Individual	p. 300
A Tribal God in the Wilderness	p. 302
Telecommunications to the Planetary God	p. 303
Neither "Race" nor "Chosen People" …	p. 305
The Question of the State	p. 306
Maimonides then and Now	p. 309
Science and Philosophy in the Twelfth Century	p. 309
The Bodily Forms of God	p. 310
The Face or Category of "In Front Of"	p. 312
"The Eyes of YHWH"	p. 313
Generosity and Rigor	p. 315
Speculative Kabbalah and Modernity	p. 317
Seeing and Speaking	p. 318
Philosophy and Prophecy	p. 320
"Practical Faith"	p. 323
The Idolatry of History	p. 327
Levels of Meaning and the Atheism of Scripture	p. 329
The Crowns on the Letters	p. 329
The Meanings of a Bottle Found in the Ocean	p. 331
The "Garden" and Its Four Levels	p. 335
Peshat: The Literal, Plain, or Obvious Sense	p. 337
Remez: The Allusive Meaning	p. 337
Derash: The "Allegorical" Meaning	p. 339
The Hermeneutic Situation: Absence Postulated a Priori	p. 341
Sod: The Hidden or Esoteric Sense	p. 341
The White Space in the Text	p. 344
The Name and Its Interpretations	p. 346
Words of God and the Atheism of Scripture	p. 348
Sources	p. 353
Index	p. 355
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