`Mental health professionals will have a special interest in this landmark work, but laypersons concerned with the Holocaust and its continuing emotional effects will want to read it too. Highly recommended.' - Library Journal USA

`... great value to all those whose work brings them face to face with the traumatic effects of the Holocaust upon survivors of all nationalities and their children. ... special interest to those involved in the study of post-traumatic stress in general and intergenerational trauma transmission in particular.' - American Academy of Psychoanalysis Journal

`A powerful, richly informative book.' - Jewish Chronicle

Classical positions on central topics--mind/body, epistemology, freedom/determinism--are presented in a series of imagined discussions between renowned philosophers and critical interlocutors.

In the same way atomic structures explain the physical properties of an object, neuroscientists are now learning about the human mind by examining how the neurons in the brain are connected to one another and their surrounding environments. Will brain scientists ever be capable of reading minds? Why are certain things harder to remember than others? The Brain-Shaped Mind addresses these and other questions to provide a clear account of how the structure of the brain influences the workings of the mind. Naomi Goldblum is a lecturer in psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. She has studied neuropsychology with a particular emphasis on cognitive psychology.

In the same way atomic structures explain the physical properties of an object, neuroscientists are now learning about the human mind by examining how the neurons in the brain are connected to one another and their surrounding environments. Will brain scientists ever be capable of reading minds? Why are certain things harder to remember than others? The Brain-Shaped Mind addresses these and other questions to provide a clear account of how the structure of the brain influences the workings of the mind. Naomi Goldblum is a lecturer in psychology at Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel. She has studied neuropsychology with a particular emphasis on cognitive psychology.

Classical positions on central topics--mind/body, epistemology, freedom/determinism--are presented in a series of imagined discussions between renowned philosophers and critical interlocutors.

"You shall have no other gods besides Me." This injunction, handed down through Moses three thousand years ago, marks one of the most decisive shifts in Western culture: away from polytheism toward monotheism. Despite the momentous implications of such a turn, the role of idolatry in giving it direction and impetus is little understood. This book examines the meaning and nature of idolatry--and, in doing so, reveals much about the monotheistic tradition that defines itself against this sin.

The authors consider Christianity and Islam, but focus primarily on Judaism. They explore competing claims about the concept of idolatry that emerges in the Hebrew Bible, as a "whoring after false gods." Does such a description, grounded in an analogy of sexual relations, presuppose the actual existence of other gods with whom someone might sin? Or are false gods the product of "men's hands," simply a matter of misguided belief? The authors show how this debate, over idolatry as practice or error, has taken shape and has in turn shaped the course of Western thought--from the differentiation between Jewish and Christian conceptions of God to the distinctions between true and false belief that inform the tradition of religious enlightenment.

Ranging with authority from the Talmud to Maimonides, from Marx to Nietzsche and on to G. E. Moore, this brilliant account of a subject central to our culture also has much to say about metaphor, myth, and the application of philosophical analysis to religious concepts and sensibilities. Its insights into pluralism and intolerance, into the logic and illogic of the arguments religions aim at each other, make "Idolatry" especially timely and valuable inthese days of dark and implacable religious difference.

Avishai Margalit builds his social philosophy on this foundation: a decent society, or a civilized society, is one whose institutions do not humiliate the people under their authority, and whose citizens do not humiliate one another. What political philosophy needs urgently is a way that will permit us to live together without humiliation and with dignity. Most of the philosophical attention nowadays is drawn to the ideal of the just society based on the right balance between freedom and equality. The ideal of the just society is a sublime one but hard to realize. The decent society is an ideal which can be realized even in our children's lifetime. We should get rid of cruelty first, advocated Judith Shklar. Humiliation is a close second. There is more urgency in bringing about a decent society than in bringing about a just one. Margalit begins concretely where we live, with all the infuriating acts of humiliation that make living in the world so difficult. He argues in a concrete way in the spirit of Judith Shklar and Isaiah Berlin. This is a social philosophy that resists all those menacing labels that promote moral laziness, just as it urges us to get beyond the behavior that labels other human beings. Margalit can't be earmarked as liberal or conservative. If a label is necessary, then the most suitable is George Orwell's humane socialism, a far cry from Animal Farm socialism with its many tools of oppression. How to be decent, how to build a decent society, emerges out of Margalit's analysis of the corrosive functioning of humiliation in its many forms. This is a thoroughly argued and, what is much more, a deeply felt book that springs from Margalit's experience at the borderlands of conflicts between Eastern Europeans and Westerners, between Palestinians and Israelis.