Johannes Climacus, thirty years old, born and bred in Copenhagen, aspires to eternal happiness. Becoming a Christian, he says, is a prerequisite for this happiness. Climacus is a pseudonym for Søren Kierkegaard, the renowned nineteenth century Danish philosopher considered to be the father of existential philosophy. In two books: Philosophical Fragments and Concluding Unscientific Postscript to Philosophical Fragments , Kierkegaard portrays Climacus's religious development in his search for his own way to faith, as if he were climbing a psychological/epistemological ladder to reach the climax of spiritual existence. This spiritual development culminates in the believer's dialogue with the absolute-God. In Human Dialogue with the Absolute , the author describes Climacus's philosophical journey to absolute faith. She focuses on the religious stage of Kierkegaard's philosophy, in particular the climax of religious existence, in which the believer attains 'an absolute relation to the absolute'. The believer aspires to remove his doubts and establish a serious, absolute approach within his existence, toward the absolute-God. The philosophical and existential questions that constitute the central theme of this book are how a believer can acknowledge his progress; and how will he know that he has conquered spiritual climax, attained absolute faith. These questions are meaningful even today to the spiritual person.

On the morning of June 7th 415 BC the people of Athens woke to find that the statues of the Idol Hermes, which stood in front of private houses and temples where vandalised. Every citizen could see his divine guardian standing at his doorstep damaged and desecrated, and gradually they found that they not alone, the whole city have lost its divine guardian. Trepidation was great. The Athenians wanted to discover the identity of the vandalisers and announced that they will give rewards and immunity to the informers who would provide some information about the blasphemy. The information received included more than information about the damaging of statues, it included information about desecration of Oration ceremonies held in private houses. The scandal was immense, the biggest one in Athenian history. Arrests were made, prosecutions, executions and flights to exile. Andocides, who was one of the accused, lists, in the defence speech he gave, the speech about the Orations, the chain of events and tries, of-course, to prove his innocence. The speech gives important information on the scandal and is an key source for learning about state events at the end of the 5th century BC.

The twenty-five new studies in this volume present the reader with an up-to-date picture of some of the issues and the methodologies that engage scholars of the Ancient Near East. These essays reflect the broad span of the field, both geographically and chronologically, from Sumerian texts of the third millennium BCE, to the town of Nuzi in Iraqi Kurdistan in the mid-second millennium, from there to inquiries into Assyrian and Babylonian documents and inscriptions, as well as into recently recovered Aramaic ostraca from Idumea in southern Israel dating to the fourth century BCE. Rounding off this varied and rich collection are several investigations concerning Ancient Israel and biblical matters. Specialists from Israel, Europe, the United States, Canada and Japan have joined together in this volume to honor Israel Eph'al, professor emeritus of Jewish History at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, whose many scholarly achievements are hereby noted.

Two distinct theories, each developed by an important theoretician in the field of psychoanalysis, constitute the theoretical starting point of this book. Donald Winnicott described the dialectic between two modalities of experience, the subjective and the objective, as creating a potential space. Wilfred Bion, from a totally different standpoint, considered the possible effects of destructive relations between an emergent aspect and a continuous aspect of human very being, believing that the interaction between them was central to the existence of a healthy and dynamic self. Bion thus assumed not only the simultaneous existence of two forms of perception, but also the existence of dynamic relationships between them. The aim of this book is to go one stage beyond these theories, and to describe the specific significance of different types of interaction between the two aspects of the self, as defined by Bion, by examining the influence of the integration between them on Winnicott’s potential space. For this purpose I expand Bion’s definition of these two elements: The term ‘emergent self’ embraces that aspect of the self which experiences the world of objects as constantly changing, discontinuous, impossible to grasp and explain, and not cumulative in terms of past and future or cause and effect. As against this, the term ‘continuous self’ embraces that aspect of the self which is responsible for the experience of continuity, for the ability to make deductions, and for the ability to remember and thereby to accumulate objects in terms of the laws of common reality: causality, time and space. In this context I show that every mental event, whether it is located in consciousness or in the unconscious, in a dream or in memory, contains these two modalities. Every mental event has an emergent aspect – which marks it as a unique, private event, inexplicable and unforeseeable – as well as a continuous aspect that simultaneously locates that same event as part of a sequence of causality and memory. The nature of the interaction between the emergent and the continuous aspects determines the possible degree of integration between them, which creates what I designate as the ‘lyrical dimension of potential space’: the dimension which transforms human mind from a flat expanse to a three-dimensional space. The manner in which the lyrical dimension of mental space makes it possible to extract the a priori potential from within the boundaries of actual existence is described as explaining the human capacity to mourn, to know and to love. The book analyzes several major literary works, such as T.S Eliot’s “Four Quartets”, Camus’ “Myth of Sisyphe”, as well as Israeli writers (H.N. Bialik, Amos Oz, A.B. Yohoshua), that either describe or else enact different variations on the theme of the lyrical dimension.

Isaiah Tishby, through his study of hitherto unknown manuscripts and of published works, succeeded in revising the prevalent view of the beliefs and outlook of Luzzatto and his disciples. Luzzatto is confirmed by this book as a central figure at the origins of all modern Jewish movements and as one of the most profound mystics in the history of Jewish culture. Introduction by Joseph Dan. Joseph Dan is Emeritus Gershom Scholem Professor Emeritus of Kabbalah at the Hebrew University of Jerusaem.

A.C.E.S. is a skills book designed to guide university students through a successful reading of academic texts in English. It is especially designed for students for whom English is not a first language and who live and study in a non-English speaking environment. In A.C.E.S., students are advised how to approach academic texts, helped through some of the common obstacles to comprehension, such as vocabulary, and encouraged to take advantage of elements in the text which aid comprehension. Accompanied by a CD of the digital version of the student's book for use in class.

ACES is a skills book designed to guide university students through successful reading of academic texts in English. It is especially designed for students for whom English is not a first language and who live and study in a non-English speaking environment. In ACES, students are advised how to approach academic texts, helped through some of the common obstacles to reading comprehension, such as vocabulary, and encouraged to take advantage of elements in the text which aid comprehension.

This book is a history, an indictment, a lament, and an appeal, focusing on the messianic trend in Lubavitch hasidism. It records the shattering of one of Judaism's core beliefs and the remarkable equanimity with which the standard-bearers of Orthodoxy have allowed it to happen. This is a development of striking importance for the history of religions, and it is an earthquake in the history of Judaism. David Berger describes the unfolding of this historic phenomenon and proposes a strategy to contain it.

What is fair? How do rights join hands with generosity? How can punishment be justified? Is there recompense for human suffering? What sense can we make of immortality, or of the idea of a messianic age? In On Justice , Lenn Goodman offers the first general theory of justice for more than a century to tap the riches of the Jewish tradition-biblical, rabbinic, and philosophical-and bring its texts into dialogue with the classic works of Western ethics and political philosophy. Against the backdrop of a conversation, he opens up with Saadiah, Halevi, Maimonides, and Spinoza, with Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Rawls-Goodman, developing a fresh, ontological approach to the core issues of ethics, politics, and the human condition. The original ideas of On Justice will engage both Jewish and non-Jewish philosophers and students of society and ethics.