Rabbi Neil Kraft z’l

The paediatrician and the rabbi.

OBJECTIVES During recent decades, rabbis in Israel have been playing an increasing role in the consultation of patients or their families on medical issues. The study was performed to determine the attitude of physicians to rabbinical consultation by parents of sick children for purposes of basic medical decision making. DESIGN AND SETTING A questionnaire was prepared which contained question...

Moses Maimonides: rabbi or medicine.

The great medieval Jewish philosopher Moses Maimonides was also a practicing physician who contributed a number of important works to medical literature. Modern students of these treatises have made extravagant claims about Maimonides' scientific outlook and have attributed to him important discoveries and innovations. Viewed in its historical and religious content, Maimonides' medical work app...

Maimonides (1138-1204): rabbi, physician and philosopher.

Rabbi: Exploring the Inner World through Stories

In the light of this interest, I designed "Rabbi", a conversational storytelling system that simulates a rabbi with a repertoire of Hasidic stories to offer as indirect counsel. It approaches narrative through a psycho-social theory of discourse which looks not only at the linguistic structures of the text but also at the socio-cultural context in which the contract between teller and listener ...

Neil Turnbull

This paper examines the way in which ‘authority’ and ‘authoritarianism’ have been confl ated in contemporary philosophical thought. More specifi cally, it will show how the psycho-social critique of political authority developed by the Frankfurt School in the 1930s established a paradigm for the critique of political authority as ‘authoritarian irrationalism’. The paper goes on to explore the l...