Legal positivists typically describe law as ‘thinly’ normative to distinguish it from the ‘thick’ normative force moral norms have; which legal norms may lack. One popular account of thin normativity is social normativity. But a number of scholars have offered accounts of what it is to be a thin norm that are distinct from social normativity. This paper addresses these alternative accounts of what it is to be a thin norm. It also explores whether law counts as necessarily ‘thinly normative’ (...) on these accounts. I argue that some accounts of thin normativity are so generic (‘super-thin’) that they are unable to distinguish between (thin) norms and nonnormative facts and thus collapse into triviality. I also consider more metaphysically demanding accounts of thin normativity, such as the view that everything is a norm that is essentially represented by deontic modals. However, law might fail to meet the demands of these slightly thicker accounts. I thus propose a view of law as consisting in nonnormative facts (diagnostic categories) and suggest sketching accounts of thin normativity as contingent, rather than necessary, features of laws and legal systems. (shrink)

While Bernard Suits's understanding of games has significantly influenced the philosophy of sport, the longest sustained investigation in The Grasshopper is of make-believe and roleplaying games. Suits’s discussion of make-believe and roleplaying is found in chapters 9 through 12, but what he says there is uncharacteristically unclear. To clarify Suits’s account, the present paper distinguishes between two arguments that Suits interweaves. In the first, Suits argues that game playing is not a species of play. In the second, Suits argues that (...) playing a make-believe or role-playing game is the same — at heart — as playing a game of any type. While the paper takes no position on the former, it defends the latter argument against several important objections by Thomas Hurka and C. Thi Nguyen. It contends, furthermore, that Suits is not simply trying to show that his theory of game playing can account for make-believe and roleplaying games. Rather, Suits is also using make-believe and roleplaying games to clarify exactly how his theory of game playing should be understood. (shrink)

Volume 24, Issue 10, October 2024, Page 80-82.

No detailed description available for "Berkeley's American Sojourn".