The Center supports research projects dealing with historical or current reciprocal ties between knowledge, culture, and politics, and with the development of innovative teaching and writing methods that translate the theoretical interest in such issues into tangible academic work. The Center’s researchers are attuned to the challenges peculiar to the present moment in time and to the current conditions for the production and organization of knowledge in the humanities. The Center strives to broaden the target audience of the humanities and amplify their public influence while at the same time carrying on the tradition of critical thought that has always been associated with them.

The Minerva Humanities Center began its operations in 2009 thanks to a grant from the German Minerva Foundation. With the inauguration of the Center were launched its first three research projects. The Migrating Knowledge project, headed by Professor Rivka Feldhay, reexamines the intellectual heritage of the early modern era in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia as a product of the migration of scholars, ideas, manuscripts, instruments, and linguistic expertise. The project Lexicon for Political Theory: Encyclopedia in the Making, led by Professor Adi Ophir, is initiating the writing and compilation of lexical essays on concepts – traditional, borrowed, and invented – that relate to the political; and the project Living Together: Exploring Modes of Political Membership, headed by Dr. Raef Zreik, is designed to enrich the existing repertory of forms of association, belonging, and political citizenship. The project is grounded in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sources of all eras (premodern, modern, contemporary) in an attempt to expand the perspectives that emerge from the clash between liberalism and its recent critics.

Minerva Humanities Center – Annual Report 2011-2012 - Click to read

International Scientific Board

• Prof. Dr. Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, Germany (Chair). renn@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
• Prof. Dr. Gerd Graßhoff, Professor for History of Ancient Science, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. gerd.grasshoff@topoi.org
• Prof. Dr. Kostas Gavroglu, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Athens University, Athens, Greece. kgavro@cc.uoa.gr
• Prof. Dr. Yaron Ezrachi (Emeritus), Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. yaron.ezrahi@huji.ac.il
• Prof. Dr. Ora Limor, Open University, Raanana, Israel. orali@openu.ac.il
• Prof. Dr.  Leo Corry, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. corry@post.tau.ac.il

The “Living Together” group has been working together since February 2010 under the guidance of Dr. Raef Zreik. The overall aim of the group’s research project is to enrich the repertoire of available options for living together within a political community.

In order to develop new approaches to the question of membership in a political community, the group attempts to create space for a new vocabulary that can stretch the imagination into novel, original ways of thinking about related questions such as citizenship, friendship and love, solidarity, being a neighbor and being a native, community and civil society, the public sphere and privacy. The project draws on Muslim and Jewish sources that may enable it to rethink political community and membership beyond the perspectives opened in recent debates between liberalism and its contemporary Western critics.

The group members share common academic interests but come from different departments and have diverse academic backgrounds and work methods, and thus enhance the group’s unique interdisciplinary character.

The group’s work is conducted on three levels:

• In its bi-weekly seminars, the group reads and discusses central texts in different fields, regarding citizenship, modernity and secularism, love, friendship and respect. The main issue that occupies the group in these discussions is the possibility of rethinking political membership through new categories. The discussion aims to enrich the diverse projects of the group members.
• The group encourages presentations of its members’ individual researches in front of a receptive audience of peers. These presentations take place once a month. The individual projects of the group members are partly sponsored by the Minerva Humanities Center. The Minerva Humanities Center also helps the researchers find external sources of funding and possibilities of publishing their work.
• In addition to the regular meetings of the group, the group members organize symposiums of relevant topics of their interest, that are intended for the general public or for the academic community. The purpose is to give young researchers the opportunity to gain experience in conference organization, to meet other researchers in their respective fields, and to present their work before wider audiences.

The group encourages the development of sub-groups, guided by the group members, that will discuss topics related to those of the larger group. In the recent year one such sub-group has operated, led by Dr. Ahmad Igbaria, and its members have focused on texts on contemporary political Islam.

The approach of the Migrating Knowledge research group is grounded in the belief that communication, translation, cross-cultural encounters, and diffusion play a vital role in the construction of knowledge. Moreover, it presupposes that ideas are not ‘bodiless’ and do not exist in abstract space. Ideas are embedded in texts, objects, diagrams, instruments, and various kinds of equations and images. This point of view also presumes that, of their very nature, ideas are connected to people – producers, carriers, transmitters, audiences – who in turn belong to a particular discipline, profession, intellectual current, social class, religion, or nationality.

Reflection about knowledge from the perspective of its ‘migrant’ nature brings to the fore many questions: What is it that is transferred in the course of migration? (Problems, ideas, objects, discourses, techniques, models, institutions, technologies or contexts?) How do individual or group identities shape the migration of knowledge and how are they themselves shaped by the migration of the knowledge that accompanies them? How does the migration of knowledge modify the boundaries of disciplines or fields of knowledge, or – taking a broader view – of the globus intellectualis? And how is authoritative knowledge formed in the process of migration from one context to another?

On a different level, the examination of knowledge in motion raises new questions concerning the nature and meaning of the process of migration: Does migration signify a reproduction, an appropriation, a localization, or a naturalization? Are there any features common to migration in time and space that can form a basis for conceptualizing knowledge in different disciplines? What are the limits of the transformation that takes place by way of migration: at what point does the transformation end and something new or different emerges?

The Migrating Knowledge project seeks to unravel the epistemological implications of this migration and to chart the political, social, and religious implications of the movement of knowledge. As a starting point for our discussion the group will focus on an array of case-studies drawn from the history of the early modern era in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia (China and Japan). Through a critical-historical examination, the group strives to reexamine the intellectual heritage of the early modern era as a product of the migration of scholars, ideas, manuscripts, instruments, and linguistic expertise. The group’s work will be focused on the forging of historical narratives about science, nationalism, and liberal thought, as well as about processes of secularization.

The project comprises several distinct research groups:

A research group on Migrating knowledge in the eastern Mediterranean basin during the late medieval and early modern periods, led by Professor Tzvi Langermann. The group will focus on the transmission and transformation of scientific and other types of knowledge along the axis running from Venice to Constantinople, mostly during the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries. This chapter in the migration of knowledge is of particular interest given that both parties, seated on opposite sides of the Muslim-Christian divide, were eager to learn about the developments taking place on the opposite side, and because forced migrations of highly educated populations – Greek refugees moving to Italy in the wake of the Ottoman conquests, and Jewish and Muslim deportees forced to move from the Iberian peninsula to Italy and the Ottoman realms – fostered far-reaching exchanges of knowledge.

A research group on Renaissance Humanism, led by Dr. Hanan Yoran. In many respects, the Humanism of the Renaissance can be regarded as a rampaging of the existing cultural order. Intellectually, the Humanists rejected the metaphysical assumptions of medieval philosophy, developing original historical, political, and ethical languages as well as new practices of spirituality and new techniques for shaping the self. Socially, humanist professional identity was not bound to a single institution or occupation (like the medieval university, for instance) and most Humanists were geographically and professionally mobile in their search for patrons. The purpose of this research group is to examine the links between the innovative aspects of the Humanist discourse, on the one hand, and the fragile social identity of the Humanists, on the other. From this perspective special attention will be given to examining the ways in which the Humanists reinterpreted the classical literary heritage and incorporated it into their own discourse.

A research group on the transfers of knowledge and generation of new ideas in Galileo’s physics, led by Dr. Ido Yavetz. The group will study the manner in which Galileo confronted two different traditions – the Aristotelian dynamics, on the one hand, and the Archemedean statics on the other – to form, from and against them, his physics of motion. The group will also examine the responses of Jesuit scientists to Galileo’s work and his own attitudes toward the research of his contemporaries, casting light on the vibrant exchanges of knowledge that occurred in the field of science between different conceptions (some opposite, some complimentary) – all this in the short span of a few decades in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

A research group on the migration of knowledge into and within East Asia (i.e. China and Japan) during the second Millennium AD, led by Dr. Asaf Goldschmidt. The group will focus on a number of separate though parallel instances of transmission of scientific and medical knowledge from the Western world into East Asia, and of the transmission of such knowledge among East Asian cultures, primarily between China and Japan. The timeframe of the analysis spans from the period of the Song Dynasty (960-1276) to the Qing dynasty (1644-1911). The group will also focus on temporal transmission of knowledge within the Chinese and the Japanese context, which resembles to some extent the transmission of ancient Greek knowledge back to Europe via the Muslim world. This aspect of the group’s work will center on the reevaluation and reintegration of ancient knowledge that was newly presented, and of its integration or rejection as a result of this renewed presentation. The analysis of the migration of knowledge will focus on the social-cultural context in which operated agents of transmission from both sides – the transmitting side, and the receiving one.

A research group on Therapy in Translation: Knowledge, Culture and Politics, led by Professor Jose Brunner and Dr. Galia Plotkin Amrami. This group explores a variety of ways, in which therapeutic discourses originating and developing in the Western private world of the clinical, are appropriated to interpret and conceptualize collective processes and events taking place in the public arena of Western and non-Western cultures. In order to inquire into the manifold forms of translation by which concepts are transposed from the realm of the clinical to the broader social sphere, we focus on the transformational processes in which professional therapeutic models and categories are given a new life, as well as on the purposes they serve in other contexts. We consider such processes, which we put under the general metaphorical heading of “translation”, to be interpretive, interactive and creative, for rather than reproducing pre-existing patterns in a new cultural environment, such translations generate new meanings and re-shape socio-cultural hierarchies.

Against the backdrop of present-day relations between power, state, market, and religion, and in light of the new conflicts that are related to them, the Lexicon project seeks to reintroduce a series of basic questions about the essence of government and the boundaries of the political act; the reciprocal relations between mechanisms of the state, and the market; political theology and religious politics; the institution of citizenship and the distinction between citizens and non-citizens; the global political order and the new forms of rule it engenders; and more. The discussion of these issues carries a particular importance in the state of Israel, whose establishment was never anchored in a strong tradition either of political theory or of constitutional law, and in which still today there is hardly any critical thinking about the most basic foundational political questions and assumptions. The research conducted as part of the Lexicon group feeds on a close observation of the Israeli predicament, attempting to explore the imprint that it leaves upon the theoretical thought. However, the theoretical thought itself is not centered on Israel and is directed also at a global discourse community engaged in political-critical thought.

The research in this project is guided by a return to the most ancient philosophical question – “What is X?” – posed here for the purpose of testing common expectations and widely accepted theoretical frameworks. The lexical investigation does not seek definitions that reconstruct and summarize the history of the use of a particular concept under discussion, nor does it presume to seal the debate regarding this concept; on the contrary: it encourages new and original answers, welcomes multiple perspectives and interpretive disagreements, and strives to bring to the fore both cultural and disciplinary differences. This discussion takes place in full awareness of the fact that every explication of a concept must necessarily address a whole combination of concepts that are interconnected either within a single discourse or across discourses; the (re)definition is put forth in order to problematize this combination and discuss it critically.

The framing question “What is X?” functions as a formal common denominator of the various individual studies the project will initiate and compile. In content, the only feature common to these lexical essays, or definitions, is their emphasis on the political aspect of the concepts they present and explain. However, the project neither presupposes nor seeks to impose any one conception of the political: its nature will emerge anew, implicitly or explicitly, with each new definition of a concept and with the links that form between these definitions.

The project’s two avenues for exposure are a series of conferences and a journal. The conferences, held twice a year, host researchers from all areas of the humanities and social sciences interested in rethinking the basic concepts of their field and considering in particular the political aspect of these concepts. Papers presented at the conferences are submitted for publication in Mafte’akh, an online academic journal that will appear twice a year and function as a lexicon in the making. Papers submitted for publication in Mafte’akh undergo the usual procedures of academic evaluation. The journal’s editing is carried out by a class of M.A. students. Its first issue has appeared in Hebrew in January, 2010. An English version is scheduled to appear several months later, and beginning in 2011 the journal will appear regularly in both languages, providing a platform for researchers worldwide.

The Lexicon project is affiliated with several other research groups, which will promote lexical studies in areas of particular interest:

A research group on the political and philosophical theory of space, led by Ariel Hendel. The group studies and develops concepts relating to the political construction of space and spatial aspects of politics. The group’s goal is to rethink space not just as an object of research and an element of the political but also as a research tool that stands to broaden and enrich our understanding of the political matter and the political field.

A research group on political economy, led by Dotan Leshem. The group examines the unique form of the current economy, tracing political concepts in the writings of contemporary economists and interpreting them critically. This work is understood as a perquisite for the rebuilding of a conceptual language in the field of political economics, in light of the estrangement in recent decades of critical scholarship from economic issues.

Photo-lexic is an international research group led by Ariella Azoulay. More than half of its members are non-Israelis and it operates primarily online. The group studies and develops concepts relating to photography, both as image and as practice, with a special focus on the ways in which people – those who take pictures, those who appear in them, and those who look at them – use photography. Photography is perceived in this context as a possible instrument of power and government as well as a civilian practice that challenges the sovereign power and disrupts its field of vision. By exploring photography as a form of being-together, the group seeks to rethink central concepts of political philosophy from the point of view of the ruled rather than the rulers.

The Minerva Humanities Center began its operations in 2009 thanks to a grant from the German Minerva Foundation. With the inauguration of the Center were launched its first three research projects. The Migrating Knowledge project, headed by Professor Rivka Feldhay, reexamines the intellectual heritage of the early modern era in Europe, the Middle East and East Asia as a product of the migration of scholars, ideas, manuscripts, instruments, and linguistic expertise. The project Lexicon for Political Theory: Encyclopedia in the Making, led by Professor Adi Ophir, is initiating the writing and compilation of lexical essays on concepts – traditional, borrowed, and invented – that relate to the political; and the project Living Together: Exploring Modes of Political Membership, headed by Dr. Raef Zreik, is designed to enrich the existing repertory of forms of association, belonging, and political citizenship. The project is grounded in Muslim, Christian, and Jewish sources of all eras (premodern, modern, contemporary) in an attempt to expand the perspectives that emerge from the clash between liberalism and its recent critics.

Minerva Humanities Center – Annual Report 2011-2012

International Scientific Board

• Prof. Dr. Jürgen Renn, Max Planck Institute for History of Science, Berlin, Germany (Chair). renn@mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de
• Prof. Dr. Gerd Graßhoff, Professor for History of Ancient Science, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. gerd.grasshoff@topoi.org
• Prof. Dr. Kostas Gavroglu, Department of History and Philosophy of Science, Athens University, Athens, Greece. kgavro@cc.uoa.gr
• Prof. Dr. Yaron Ezrachi (Emeritus), Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel. yaron.ezrahi@huji.ac.il
• Prof. Dr. Ora Limor, Open University, Raanana, Israel. orali@openu.ac.il
• Prof. Dr.  Leo Corry, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel. corry@post.tau.ac.il

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Ronnen Ben-Arie is a doctoral candidate at the Division of Government and Political Theory at the School of Political Sciences at the Haifa University. His doctoral research examines the concept “Spaces of Resistance” in the political thought of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze and explores possibilities for resistance and change in political order. Ben-Arie graduated the Architecture Department of the Bezalel Academy and holds a Masters degree from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. He is also a member of the research group for political and philosophical thought of space, which is part of the Lexicon Group for Political Thought at the Minerva Humanities Center.

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Joseph David is a faculty member in the Faculty of Oriental Studies and fellow in Wolfson College at Oxford. During the past few years he has lectured at the Oriental Institute (Oxford), Interdisciplinary Center (Herzliya), Haifa University, and Rutgers University. He was a fellow in the European Forum (Hebrew University), Hauser Global Law School (New York University), the Center for Advanced Judaic Studies (University of Pennsylvania), IDI and Shalom Hartman Institute (Jerusalem). Dr. David is interested in the interfaces of law and theology and philosophy from the perspective of comparative legal history. His recent studies have focused on the epistemology of medieval legal systems, law and violence, law and nature, intra-religious tolerance, memory and transmission. His current study in the Minerva Humanities Center addresses various formations of belonging – family, community of faith, nation, state and territory.

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Ahmad Ighbaria is a lecturer of Arabic Language and Islamic Culture at Al-Qasemi College. His fields of expertise are Islamic philosophy, theology and logic.

Dr. Ighbaria attained his Ph.D (cum laude) from the Department of Philosophy at Haifa University, and his dissertation is entitled “The development of the Theory of Categories in Islamic philosophy”. His Masters Degree (cum laude) is from the Department of Arabic in Tel-Aviv University, about “Ibn Taymiyyah’s Critique of the Theory of Logical Definition”. In addition to his interest in classical Islamic Philosophy, Dr. Ighbaria is interested in modern Arabic thought, especially in the second half of the twentieth century, in issues like heritage and modernism. Among his publications is a translation into Hebrew of al-Farabi’s “Opinions of the People of the Perfect City”.

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Yoav Meyrav is a doctoral candidate at the School of Philosophy at Tel Aviv University. He is writing his dissertation on Al-Farabi’s (c. 870-950) concept of happiness (sa’adah) and is primarily interested in the introduction of Greek Philosophy into the Arabic world in medieval times, with an emphasis on matters of terminology and translation. In collaboration with Dr. Carlos Fraenkel of McGill University, Meyrav is currently working on an English translation of Themistius’ (4^th Century AD) paraphrase of Aristotle’s Metaphysics Λ, which survived in its entirety only in Moses Ibn Tibbon’s 13^th Century Hebrew translation.

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Merav Amir is a post-doctoral fellow at the Leonard Davis Institute for International Relations. She received her PhD from The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas and from The Shirley and Leslie Porter School of Cultural Studies at Tel Aviv University. Her dissertation examines the concept of the border in the regime of movement in the Occupied Palestinian Territory. Her publications include: “The Making of a Void Sovereignty: Political Implications of the Military Checkpoints in the West Bank”, Environment and Planning D: Society and Space (forthcoming 2013); “On the Border of Indeterminacy: The Separation Wall in East Jerusalem”, Geopolitics 16:4 (2011); and (with Hagar Kotef) “Between Imaginary Lines. Technologies of Power at the Israeli Checkpoints”, Theory, Culture and Society 28:1. In the lexicon project she studies the concept of security.

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Ariella Azoulay teaches visual culture and contemporary philosophy in The Program for Culture and Hermeneutics, Bar-Ilan University. She is the author of several books, including Civil Imagination: The Political Ontology of Photography (Resling, forthcoming; in Hebrew); Constituent Violence 1947-1950 (Resling, 2009; in Hebrew); Act of State (Etgar, 2008; in Hebrew, and published in Italian as Atto di Stato Palestina-Israele, 1967–2007: Storia Fotografica dell’Occupazione, by Bruno Mondadori, Milan, 2008), ; The Civil Contract of Photography (Zone Books, 2008, in English; and Resling, 2007, in Hebrew); Once upon a Time: Photography Following Walter Benjamin (Bar-Ilan University Press, 2006; in Hebrew); Death’s Showcase ( MIT Press, 2001); and (with Adi Ophir) This Regime Which is Not One: Occupation and Democracy Between the Sea and the River (Resling, 2008; in Hebrew). Azoulay is also a curator and her recent exhibitions include Constituent Violence: 1947-1950 (Zochrot Gallery, 2009) and Act of State, a photographic documentation of forty years of Israeli occupation (Minshar Gallery, 2007).
For more information look at : http://cargocollective.com/AriellaAzoulay

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Yishai Blank is a senior lecturer at Tel Aviv University’s Law Faculty, where he also serves as chair of the LL.A. committee. Blank holds an LL.B. and an additional B.A. in philosophy (both cum laude) from TAU; he earned his S.J.D. at Harvard University. He researches and teaches administrative law, local government law, law and space, legal theory, and political thought. His articles on topics in these fields have appeared in leading publications in Israel and abroad. He is currently researching the legal changes taking place in global cities, and the decentralization and expansion of the role of local governments and other non-state entities with respect to church-state issues. Blank has been a visiting professor at several universities in the United States, among them Brown and Cornell. He was awarded a grant from the Israeli Science Foundation and was a member of the Young Scholars in the Humanities and Social Sciences Forum of the Israeli Academy of Sciences and Humanities.

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Lin Chalozin-Dovrat is a Ph.D. candidate at Tel Aviv University’s School of Cultural Studies. Her dissertation analyses Time/Space relations in linguistic change and in the theoretical discourse on linguistic change, and considers the interrelations of political, social, and linguistic theories of change. Within the framework of this research, the examination of the intellectual context of theories of change demonstrates the strong ties between political theory, social sciences, and linguistics. Her research in the Lexicon will provide an analysis of the concept of crisis based on political and cognitive theories. Chalozin-Dovrat lectures at Tel Aviv University and in the Department of Film and Television at Sapir College.

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Udi Edelman is a student at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel Aviv University. His master’s thesis deals with contemporary political activism and with embarrassment and embarrassing as tactics of political action. Edelman is the co-editor of Mafte’akh – A Lexical Review of Political Thought, published by The Minerva Humanities Center. He is a curator and director of research and academic connections at the Israeli Center for Digital Art, Holon. His own research in the Lexicon project examines the concept-art relations.

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Ronen Eidelman is an artist, writer, and activist engaged in linking art, culture, and grassroots politics. He has participated in many exhibitions and cultural and political events worldwide, and has created numerous artistic projects in the public sphere. Eidelman was born in New York City, grew up in Jerusalem, and is now based in Tel Aviv-Jaffa. He is the Co-founder and editor of Erev-Rav the leading online art and culture magazine in Hebrew and  Founded and edited numerous art and social political magazines and journals such as  “Maarav” (www.maarav.org.il)  which he created for six years. Eidelman is a graduate of the MFA program for Public Art and New Artistic Strategies at the Bauhaus University in Weimar; a lecturer on art and social change at Minshar Art College; and active in anti-occupation and anti-capitalist activist groups. The artistic projects he will initiate in the Lexicon group will deal with notions of security, memory, and the relations between them.

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Dani Filc was born in Argentina (1959) and finished medical school at the Buenos Aires University. He received his M.A. and Ph.D. at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Filc is currently a senior lecturer in the Department of Politics and Government at Ben-Gurion University, a physician at Clalit Health Services, and Chairperson of Physicians for Human Right/Israel. His publications include: Populism and Hegemony in Israel (Resling, 2006; in Hebrew), Circles of Exclusion: The Politics of Care in Israel (Cornell University Press, 2009), and The political right in Israel: the many faces of Jewish populism (Routledge, 2009). His research at the lexicon group will aim at critically redefining a cluster of concepts related to the field of the political economy of the body, such as body image, brain, cosmetics, genetics, health, hospital, nutrition, organ, wellbeing, and others. Filc is married to Myri and a father of four.

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Michal Givoni completed her Ph.D. at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University in 2008. Her work deals with transnational humanitarianism, contemporary practices of witnessing, and testimony and governmentality in emergencies. Givoni was a researcher at the Van Leer Jerusalem Institute, where she co-directed (together with Adi Ophir and Sari Hanafi) a research project on the Israeli occupation in the Palestinian territories. She was one of the editors (together with Ophir and Hanafi) of a volume on the subject, entitled The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Palestinian Territories (Zone Books, 2009). Her book on contemporary ethics of testimony is forthcoming from the Van Leer Institute / Hakibutz Hame’uchad. Givoni’s research at The Minerva Humanities Center concerns ethical practices in the political sphere and focuses on a genealogical investigation of the concepts of testimony and of indifference.

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Ariel Handel studies the construction of space and its uses in relations of power and violence. His PhD dissertation, written at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Sciences and Ideas, deals with the movement regime in the West Bank and the Gaza Strip, and studies the movement restrictions as a distinctive technology of population management and territory appropriation.

His recent publications include:
- “Exclusionary Surveillance and Spatial Uncertainty in the Occupied Palestinian Territories”, in David Lyon, Elia Zureik and Yasmeen Abu-Laban (eds.) Surveillance in Israel/Palestine (Routledge, forthcoming).

- “Where, Whereto and When in the Occupied Territories: An Introduction to Geography of Disaster” and “Chronology of the Occupation Regime: 1967-2007″, in Adi Ophir, Michal Givoni and Sari Hanafi (eds.) The Power of Inclusive Exclusion: Anatomy of Israeli Rule in the Occupied Palestinian Territories (Zone Books, 2009). – “Gated/Gating Community: The Settlements’ array in the West Bank,” in Amnon Lehavi (ed.) Gated Communities in Israel (The Buchman Law Faculty, Tel Aviv University, 2009; in Hebrew).

- “Beyond Good and Evil – The Syndrome: Shame and Responsibility in Soldiers’ Testimonies”, Theory and Criticism Vol. 32 (spring 2008; in Hebrew).

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Yoav Kenny is a Ph.D. candidate at Tel-Aviv University’s School of Philosophy (dissertation title: Animality, Biopolitics and Vegetarianism: Towards a Political Understanding of Non-Human Animals), and holds an M.A. in philosophy from Tel- Aviv University (Thesis title: The Sovereign Instant: Sovereignty, Law and Time in Derrida and Agamben). His main research interests are political philosophy, continental philosophy, political theology, biopolitics, and critical animal studies.

Kenny is co-editor of Mafte’akh – A Lexical Review of Political Thought published by The Minerva Humanities Center and a teaching assistant in the advanced course in political philosophy at Tel Aviv University’s Philosophy Department. His project in the Lexicon group concerns the political conceptualization of the non-human animal.

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Roy Kreitner teaches contracts, jurisprudence, and commercial law at the Buchmann Faculty of Law at Tel Aviv University. His research focuses on private law theory, the legal history of contracts, and the history and theory of money. He is the author of Calculating Promises: The Emergence of Modern American Contract Doctrine (Stanford University Press, 2007), which won the American Society for Legal History’s 2007 Cromwell Book Prize. Kreitner, who earned his S.J.D. at Harvard University, has received fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies, the Council for Higher Education in Israel, the Israel Science Foundation, the European Union’s TMR Network Project on European Private Law, and the Mark DeWolfe Howe Fund at Harvard Law School. This year (2009-10) Kreitner is a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Studies at Harvard University.

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Shai Lavi is a senior lecturer and the director of the Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University’s Faculty of Law. He received his Ph.D. from the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at The University of California, Berkeley. His book The Modern Art of Dying: A History of Euthanasia in the United States (Princeton University Press) won the 2006 Distinguished Book Award in sociology of law from the American Sociological Association. Lavi was a Fulbright fellow at The University of California, Berkeley; a visiting professor at Toronto University; and a Humboldt fellow at The Dubnow Institute for Jewish History and Culture in Leipzig and at the Faculty of Law at The Humboldt University, Berlin. He is currently working on the history of Jews and Muslims in Germany, with a special focus on the debate regarding animal slaughter rituals.

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Dotan Leshem is a postdoctoral fellow at The Minerva Humanities Center at Tel Aviv University and head of the research group on political economy in the Lexicon project. His research interests are the history of systems of thought, the history of economic thought, political economy, ecclesiastical economy, patristics, and political theory. His Ph.D. dissertation, which was written in the program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, presents a genealogy of the definition of the economy and its intricate relationships with philosophical life, politics, and the law. It focuses on three moments in the history of the economy in the premodern era: the classical moment, the imperial moment, and the Christian moment. During his fellowship at The Minerva Humanities Center he will study the economy and its relation to politics, philosophy, and law in the modern age.

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Uzi Livneh received a B.A. in philosophy from Tel Aviv University and now is a Ph.D. candidate there. His dissertation concerns the political thought of Michel Foucault. His research in the Lexicon group will address the concept of political change/revolution and the various ways in which political thinkers and revolutionaries have conceptualized and tried to achieve radical change in the political and social fields.

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Itay Snir is a Ph.D. candidate in the School of philosophy at Tel-Aviv University. His dissertation, written under the supervision of Dr. Anat Matar, studies the concept of common-sense from philosophical and political perspectives. Snir received his M.A. (summa cum laude) from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, Tel-Aviv University, and his B.A. (summa cum laude) from the Philosophy Department and the Multidisciplinary Program in the Arts, also at TAU. He currently teaches philosophy at “Alon” high-school in Ramat-Hasharon and works as a teaching assistant at the Interdisciplinary Center in Herzliya. In the Lexicon project he studies the concept of common-sense.

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Roy Wagner holds a Ph.D. in mathematics (1997) and a Ph.D. in philosophy (2007) from Tel Aviv University. He has publishes papers in mathematics, philosophy, history of mathematics, and critical theory. Wagner teaches in the Computer Science Department at the Academic College of Tel Aviv-Jaffa. In 2009 he published the book S(z_p,z_p): Post-Structural Readings of Gödel’s Proof. His project in the Lexicon group concerns the micropolitics of resistance from the margins. Relevant concepts include “state”, “resistance”, “definition”, and concepts related to various minorities.

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Noam Yuran completed his Ph.D. in the Philosophy Department at Ben-Gurion University. His dissertation deals with money as an object of desire. Yuran is the author of Channel 2 TV: The New Etatism (Resling, 2001; in Hebrew), and The Erotic Word: Three Readings in Hanoch Levin’s Work (Haifa University Press, 2002; in Hebrew). His research in the Lexicon project examines the social ontology of money.

Rivka Feldhay

Books: R. Feldhay, Galileo and the Church: Political Inquisition or Critical Dialogue? Cambridge University Press 1995 (303 pp.) [reprint 1999]
E. Etkes & R. Feldhay (eds.with introduction ), Education and History: Cultural and Political Contexts, , The Zalman Shazar Center for Jewish History: Jerusalem 1998 (in Hebrew)

Articles: R. Feldhay, “The use and abuse of mathematical entities: Galileo and the Jesuits revisited”, in P. Machamer (ed.), A Companion to Galileo, Cambridge University Press 1998, pp. 80-146

R. Feldhay, “Religion”, in K. Park and L. Daston (eds.), The Cambridge History of Science, vol. 3, Cambridge University Press 2006, pp. 727-755

R. Feldhay, “On Wonderful Machines: The Transmission of Mechanical Knowledge   by Jesuits” Science and Education, Volume 15, Numbers 2-4, March 2006, pp. 151-172.

R. Feldhay, “Authority, Political Theology, and the Politics of Knowledge in the Transition from Medieval to Early Modern Catholicism”, Social Research, Vol 73, No 4: Winter 2006, pp. 1065-1092
R. Feldhay, “Der Fall Galilei: Der damalige Konflict zwischen Glauben und Wissen aus heutiger Sicht”, in Sterne und Weltraum, (2009) 6:44-53

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Keren Abbou Hershkovits completed her Ph.D. in the Department of Middle Eastern Studies at Ben-Gurion University. Her dissertation, written under the supervision of Dr. Nimrod Hurvitz, is titled “Historiography of Science in Arabic Texts, Tenth-Fourteenth Centuries.” It deals with the attitudes of scholars toward scientific knowledge and with the position of scientific knowledge vis-à-vis other branches of knowledge. Abbou Hershkovits is currently a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Islamic Studies at McGill University in Montreal, where she is affiliated with the “Transmission, Translation, and Transformation in Medieval Cultures” research group. She is studying the consolidation of a circle of physicians under the Abbasids, and the social and political process that led to the dominance of Galenism over other contemporary medical systems. Her research at The Minerva Humanities Center will explore the Arab historian and philosopher Ibn Khaldūn and the origins of his approach to science, and will examine how scientific theories, especially climatology, were changed once transmitted and translated into Arabic.

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Alexander Boxer received his Ph.D. in physics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 2009. His research has appeared in the journals Nature Physics and Review of Scientific Instruments. Boxer has a wide variety of interests; he holds a bachelor’s degree in classical languages from Yale (2001) and a master’s degree in the history of science from Oxford (2002). At present he is writing another doctoral thesis, in the history of science, conducted under the auspices of Professor Rivka Feldhay at Tel Aviv University. His current research, which will also be the focus of his work at The Minerva Humanities Center, involves the Steganographia of Trithemius, a cryptographic manual from 1500.

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Michal Brosh Meltzer holds an LL.B from The College of Management in Israel and is a master’s student at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. Her research reexamines Cartesian dualism in light of Descartes’ last essay, “Les Passions de l’Âme”.

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Raz Chen Morris holds an M.A. (cum laude, in the history of medieval and Renaissance science) and a Ph.D. (2001) from Tel Aviv University. His undergraduate degree is from The Hebrew University in Jerusalem. Throughout his studies Morris taught at several high schools and colleges, among them The Arts and Science High School in Jerusalem, Alma Hebrew College in Tel Aviv, The Bezalel Academy of Arts and Design in Jerusalem, Tel Aviv University, and Seminar Hakibbutzim. Today Morris is a lecturer in the graduate program of Science, Technology and Society at Bar-Ilan University. He has published widely on Renaissance science, concentrating on Kepler’s optics. His major publications to date are: “Optics, Imagination, and the Construction of Scientific Observation in Kepler’s New Science”, The Monist (2001) 84, 4:453-486; “Shadows of Instruction: Optics and Classical Authorities in Kepler’s Somnium”, Journal for the History of Ideas (2005) 66, 2:223-243; and “From Emblems to Diagrams: Kepler’s New Pictorial Language of Scientific Representation”, Renaissance Quarterly (2009) 62, 1:134-170. His research at The Minerva Humanities Center, entitled “Vision Contested”, examines the disputes over visual experience in the early stages of the New Science. Morris is married and has three children.

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Leigh Chipman received her B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. (2006) from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, and was a Kreitman postdoctoral fellow at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev (2007-2008). She is currently a postdoctoral fellow at The Minerva Humanities Center. After writing her M.A. on the stories surrounding the creation of Adam in Islam and Judaism, she turned to the field of history of medicine. A revised version of her dissertation, title The World of Pharmacy and Pharmacists in Mamlūk Cairo, is forthcoming from Brill. Leigh’s research interests are the social and intellectual history of medicine and science in the Islamicate world. At the Minerva Humanities Center she will study forms of secret writing (codes, ciphers, and alchemical writings) in the late medieval and early modern Middle East.

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Tamar Cholcman specializes in Renaissance and Baroque Art of the Netherlands and the Iberian Peninsula. Her main field of research is Ephemeral Art in the Netherlands, Spain, and Portugal during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. She studied at Tel Aviv University, The Universidad Autónoma in Madrid, and the Ludwig-Maximilians Universität, Munich. In 2006 she received her Ph.D. from Tel Aviv University. Dr. Cholcman was granted the Rottenstreich Scholarship for Outstanding Doctoral Students in Humanities and the Dan David Prize Scholarship for Young Researchers. Her publications discuss aspects of civic propaganda and ceremony as well as the theoretical problems of Ephemeral Art and its realization in the written text. Her current work explores the contribution and influence of merchants to the expansion of Ephemeral Art throughout Europe and the New World. Cholcman teaches at Tel Aviv University and at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev.

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Michael Elazar, formerly an aeronautical engineer, scientific editor of Hed-Artzi/Ma’ariv Publishing House, and Editor-in-Chief of Galileo: Israeli Periodical on Science and Thought, received a Master’s degree (1999) and a Ph.D. degree (2010) from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. His M.A. thesis discussed the “Theory of Configurations” formulated by the philosopher and theologian Nicole Oresme (1320-1382). His Ph.D. dissertation, entitled “Honoré Fabri and the Concept of Impetus: A Bridge between Paradigms”, was supervised by Professor Rivka Feldhay and focused on the Jesuit philosopher and mathematician Honoré Fabri (1608-1688). Elazar continues his research into seventeenth-century Jesuit physics as a postdoctoral fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He also serves as an assistant editor of the Cambridge Journal Science in Context.

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Ofer Elior holds a B.Sc. in Computer Science and History and a M.A. in History, Philosophy and Sociology of Science, both from the Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and a Ph.D. in Jewish Thought from Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. His Ph.D. dissertation (2011) centers on Ruah Hen, an anonymous Hebrew philosophical-scientific treatise, composed in the thirteenth century, probably in Provençe. The dissertation studies the contents of Ruah Hen, in light of the specific intellectual and cultural context in which it was written. In addition, the dissertation discusses Ruah Hen’s transmission and appropriation in several other cultural environments of European Jewry. Dr. Elior’s primary research project deals with the Jewish scientific canon in the Late Middle Ages and the Early Modern Period. The project attempts to identify the treatises which together constituted this canon, and examines the main aspects of their use as authoritative texts in the learning of science. Other research interests include the music of the spheres in the commentary tradition on Moses Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, and the concept of corporeal form in medieval Jewish thought.

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Asaf Goldschmidt is a senior lecturer at the Department of East Asian Studies at Tel Aviv University. He teaches and writes about Chinese medicine, its history, philosophy and social context. His research focuses on the transformations of Chinese medicine during the Song dynasty; the imperial government’s impact on medical knowledge and practice; and the status of physicians during this era. His book, titled The Evolution of Chinese Medicine: Song Dynasty 960–1200, was recently published by Routledge as part of the Needham Research Institute Series. His most recent research concerns the history of the Imperial Pharmacy as an imperial medical institution with public health bearing, and the history of the clinical encounter during the Song-Yuan period. At The Minerva Humanities Center he studies the temporal transmission of medical knowledge during the Song dynasty (960-1276).

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Reut Harari is an M.A. student in the History Department at Tel-Aviv University. Her research deals with the history of medicine in Japan. She earned her B.A. (summa cum laude) from TAU’s History and East Asian Departments. During her undergraduate studies, she studied also at VIU University in Venice. Harari was exposed to Japanese culture from an early age and lived in Japan for two and a half years. During that time, she studied Japanese intensively and worked for about a year in the upper house of the Japanese Parliament. Her interaction with Japan continues in her academic research, professional activities, and interpersonal relations. Her interest in the history of medicine stems from a semester of medical studies. In her work with the Migration of Knowledge research group Harari will focus on the story of Hanaoka Seishu, a Japanese physician, as a case study of the Japanese encounter with Western medical knowledge in the early modern period.

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Gal Herz is a graduate of The Open University and Alma College. He wrote his M.A. thesis on theology and politics in Baruch Kurzweil’s thought, and is now writing his Ph.D. dissertation on Karl Kraus’s language criticism. Alongside his academic work, Herz is involved in various projects that seek to combine critical theory and political activism. He is one of the founders of a center for bi-national thought. His research at The Minerva Humanities Center deals with the transfer of knowledge between aesthetics, theology, and politics in German Jewish thought at the turn of the twentieth century.

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Tzvi Langermann is a native New Englander. He earned his B.A. in history from Boston University and his Ph.D. in the history of science from Harvard University. Before joining the Department of Arabic at Bar-Ilan University in 1997, he worked for many years cataloguing manuscripts at the Jewish National Library. At The Minerva Humanities Center Langermann leads the working group on the migration of knowledge in the eastern Mediterranean during the late medieval and early modern periods. His own project concerns Yosef Shlomo Delmediggo and the sciences of his day. Langermann is married and has three children.

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Ivor Ludlam teaches ancient Greek and Latin in the Foreign Languages Department at The University of Haifa. His research focuses on analyzing Platonic dialogues as philosophical dramas and reconstructing Stoic philosophy. His research at The Humanities Center examines the transmission of the concept of ‘determinism’ from the ancient world to the seventeenth century.

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Rony Weinstein completed his Ph.D. in the Department of Jewish History at The Hebrew University (1995). In 2000-2001 he was a full fellow at The Harvard Center for Renaissance Studies (Villa I Tatti, Florence). In recent years he was a research fellow at the Department of Modern and Contemporary History at Pisa University. His project at The Minerva Humanities Center examines Jewish Encyclopedias during the early modern period as indicators of changing conceptions of knowledge.

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Nathaniel Wolloch received his Ph.D. from the History Department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem (1998). He has taught at various academic institutions in Israel. His research centers on the intellectual history of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the history of attitudes toward animals and nature in general, the history of historiography and the history of the Enlightenment. He has published articles in various academic journals, and has written two books: Subjugated Animals: Animals and Anthropocentrism in Early Modern European Culture (Humanity Books, 2006); History and Nature in the Enlightenment: Praise of the Mastery of Nature in Eighteenth-Century Historical Literature (Ashgate, 2011). His research at The Minerva Humanities Center deals with eighteenth- and nineteenth-century notions regarding the transmission of cultural knowledge between various peoples.

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Hanan Yoran completed his B.Sc. in mathematics and computer sciences at The Hebrew University and his Ph.D. at the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel Aviv University. He is now a lecturer in the Department of General History at Ben-Gurion University. His field of research is early modern intellectual and cultural history, specifically Renaissance Humanism. His book on the construction of the identity of the universal intellectual by the Erasmian Humanists will be published in 2010. The subject of his research at The Minerva Humanities Center is “Renaissance Humanism and Modernity: The Rootless Intellectual and the Groundlessness of Knowledge”.

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Ido Yavetz teaches at The Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas, at Tel Aviv University. He completed his undergraduate studies in physics at TAU and earned his M.A. and Ph.D. at the Cohn Institute. His doctoral thesis was on the British physicist Oliver Heaviside, on whom he also later published the book From Obscurity to Enigma: The Work of Oliver Heaviside, 1872-1889 (Birkhäuser, 1995). Yavetz’s main areas of research are the history of classical physics and the history of astronomy. His work also deals with the annals of technology and with the history of the study of insects in the nineteenth century. At The Minerva Humanities Center Yavetz heads a research group that studies the transfer of knowledge and generation of new ideas in Galileo’s physics.

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Sharon Zaidis-Felous holds a B.A. in business administration (specializing in marketing and financing) and an M.A. from the Cohn Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Ideas at Tel-Aviv University. The topic of her research is the “sciencability” of Ballet – presentation and symbolism in dance in the Renaissance and Baroque eras. It traces the development of the geometric ballet and examines the structure of these ballets as well as their use of the body as a language figure. Zaidis-Felous is a professional choreographer and the manager of two dance schools – “Studio Shape” in Kfar Saba and in Hod  Hasharon. She sits on the board of “The Israeli Dance Club” and is a member of the Bat-Sheva Dance Company Forum for Dance Teachers.

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Gur Zak is a lecturer in the Department of General and Comparative Literature at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He received his Ph.D. from The Centre for Medieval Studies at The University of Toronto in 2008. His Book Petrarch’s Humanism and the Care of the Self is forthcoming from the Cambridge University Press. His research at The Minerva Humanities Center concerns the spiritual implications of the revival of antiquity in the Renaissance.