Research Bites buberfellows

In this mini-series, Dr. Anna Gutgarts, Dr. Amit Gvaryahu and Dr. Idit Ben-Or will talk about how money makes the bonds that connect us to other people – and separates us as well. It's about how money constitutes what is public and what is private. 
 
In the third act of the mini-series about money, Dr. Amit Gvaryahu will talk about how paying money would constitute the body politic of the ancient Jewish people and the Jerusalem temple, year after year.

This mini series is about how money makes the bonds that connect us to other people – and separates us as well. It's about how money constitutes what is public and what is private.
This is the second episode of the series. In this episode, Dr. Anna Gutgarts will talk about how medieval individuals worked together with institutions like churches in the urban environment of Crusader Jerusalem.

In this mini-series, Dr. Anna Gutgarts, Dr. Amit Gvaryahu and Dr. Idit Ben-Or will talk to each other about the role of money in making the bonds that connect us to other people – and erecting the fences that separate us from them, too. 
This is the first act, in which Dr. Idit Ben-Or will talk about enterprising English individuals who made their own coins, and what exactly other people did with them, besides, of course, buying beer.

Some things seem like they just can't be coincidences. They seem to call for explanation. If you toss a coin many times and it repeatedly lands heads, that might be an example. Philosophers have used this idea to argue for some far-reaching conclusions, such as that there aren't really any numbers, that other universes exist and, more famously, that an all-powerful god exists. But what does it mean for something to call for explanation? And, are these arguments good ones?

In the 5th century C.E. the Greek philosopher Proclus wrote that “the same argument that keeps the whole world perfect posits evil among beings.”
In the eighteenth century, the satirist Bernard Mandeville would inspire the economist Adam Smith with his poem describing a city where “every Part was full of Vice, Yet the whole Mass a Paradise.” Connecting these two distant thinkers is the claim that evil somehow contributes to the good of the whole. How can such an articulation of good and evil make sense? And how can studying such historical arguments be relevant to understanding our situation today?

Only fifteen years after the Second World War some cities in western Germany started to contact former citizens living abroad who had been persecuted during National Socialism. A few of these cities also granted invitations to these former victims of National Socialism, inviting them to visit their former places of residency in Germany for one or two weeks. Some of these contacts and invitations started in the 1960s. Since the 1980s they took place all over Germany. Surprisingly, most of these contacts and invitations were not initiated by German politicians. Instead, former victims of the Nazi persecution within the cities as well as abroad played a major role in the initiation and the success of these initiatives. This apparent paradox is at the center of this episode about “invitations to the old hometown”.