Countering the influential view of Critical Legal Studies that law is an incoherent mixture of conflicting political ideologies, this book forges a new paradigm for understanding the common law as being unified and systematic. Alan Brudner applies Hegel's legal and moral philosophy to fashion a comprehensive synthesis of the common law of property, contract, tort, and crime. At a time when there is a strong tendency among scholars to view the common law as essentially fragmentary, inconsistent, and contradictory, Brudner suggests (...) instead a coherence that synthesizes several interrelated dichotomies: good-centered and right-based legal paradigms, instrumental and non-instrumental conceptions of law, externalist and internalist interpretations of the common law system, and communitarian and individualist attempts to found the legal enterprise. Brudner covers genuinely new ground through an interpretation of the common law from the standpoint of Hegelian legal philosophy. His unifying notion of common law corresponds to Hegel's notion of Geist, suggesting a designation of the mutual dependence of the community and the atomistic self for their confirmation as ends. (shrink)

A fully revised edition of Brudner's classic account of the foundational structures and rationale of private law. Brudner proposes a radical unification of formalist and functionalist understandings of the law. In doing so, he rethinks the foundations of tort, contract, property and unjust enrichment as a unity of private and public law.

This book tackles the relationship between the common law of judicial review, the written constitution and public international law.

As predicted by Duverger’s Law, the UK has two-party competition in each electoral district. However, there can be different patterns of two-party competition in different districts (currently there are five), so that there have usually been more than two effective parties in the Commons. Since 1874 it has always contained parties fighting seats in only one of the non-English parts of the Union. These parties wish to change the Union by strengthening, weakening, or dissolving it. By calculating the Penrose power (...) index for all parties in the House of Commons for all General Elections since 1874, we identify the occasions on which a party that wished to modify the Union was pivotal. We explain various acts (e.g, the Crofters Act 1886; the first three Irish Home Rule Bills; the Parliament Act 1911) and non-acts (e.g. the failure to enact female suffrage before 1914) by reference to the Penrose indices of the non-English parties. The indices also explain how and why policy towards Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland changed, and did not change, in the 1970s. (shrink)

Lord Rabinder Singh has been one of the leading lights in the recent development of the common law, most notably in the field of human rights and the law of privacy. Here, for the first time, he reflects on the defining themes of his career as advocate and judge. Combining his trademark originality of thought and impeccable scholarship, he selects previously published and unpublished writings to track the evolution of his approach to the common law. A substantial introduction gives context (...) to the book, while opening introductions to each piece reflect on their relevance to contemporary legal thought. The essays explore themes as diverse as judicial review, equality, and privacy and personal autonomy. Insightful, erudite, and thought-provoking, this collection is a must read for all those interested in the law and its role in society. (shrink)

Whether or not the law of sufficient reason is a basic law of formal logic is a question that merits in-depth discussion. Back in the 1960s, when discussion was held on the object and function of formal logic, some comrades were of the opinion that formal logic should not be confined to the study of the form of thinking. One of their arguments was "the law of sufficient reason requires that the contents of the premise be true." Similarly, in the (...) discussion of the truthfulness and correctness of formal logic, some comrades also held that the correctness of the form of thinking and the truthfulness of its contents are a unity. Their opinion supposed that "it is one of the requirements of the law of sufficient reason that the reason must be true." All these discussions involved the nature of the law. Therefore the current discussion is a continuation and deepening of the previous discussions on logic. It involves not only the content of the law of sufficient reason as well as its role and position in formal logic, but also the object under the study of formal logic as a branch of science and the direction of its future development. Doubtlessly, the discussion of this issue bears major significance. (shrink)

This chapter contains sections titled: 5.1 5.2 5.3 5.4 5.5 5.6 5.7 5.8 5.9 5.10 5.11.

This volume examines the problems of legal and linguistic diversity in the EU legal system. In a union of 27 member states, with 23 different languages, how can the coherence of EU law be guaranteed? Is there a common understanding between lawyers from different national backgrounds as to the meaning and domestic application of EU law? The volume addresses these central questions from a range of theoretical and practical perspectives.

Hooker’s Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity and Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew represent the issues of sociality and dissent in strikingly similar terms and articulate a common social vision. Both writers strive to harmonize social unity with inward liberty. Hooker seeks not only to refute the non-conformity of his Puritan opponents, but to reconcile them, in both heart and mind, to the social order to which they belong. Similarly, Petruchio convincingly demonstrates to Katherine that the common good (...) and her own personal happiness substantially coincide in the reciprocity and communion of marriage. (shrink)

The end of the nineteenth century and the whole of the twentieth may justifiably be called a time of great discoveries in the micro-, macro-, and megaworlds. All bearing witness to the dynamic life of the universe, these discoveries have resulted primarily from progress in the instruments of research, leading to the discovery of many new elementary particles, new forms of interaction, fields, and astrophysical objects — quasars, pulsars, sources of X-ray emissions, and others. An understanding of the essence of (...) the processes involved in these objects and phenomena, however, comes up against certain difficulties , the overcoming of which is to be sought primarily along the lines of further improvement of the tools of research and processing of the information acquired, the application of existing theories and the development of new ones in physics and astrophysics, and the utilization of the achievements of the science of the most general laws of the motion and development of nature, society, and thought, i.e., dialectical materialism, as the general methodology of acquisition of scientific knowledge. (shrink)

An historically important conception of the unity of science is explanatory reductionism, according to which the unity of science is achieved by explaining all laws of science in terms of their connection to microphysical law. There is, however, a separate tradition that advocates the unity of science. According to that tradition, the unity of science consists of the coordination of diverse fields of science, none of which is taken to have privileged epistemic status. This alternate conception (...) has roots in Otto Neurath’s notion of unified science. In this paper, I develop a version of the coordination approach to unity that is inspired by Neurath’s views. The resulting conception of the unity of science achieves aims similar to those of explanatory reductionism, but does so in a radically different way. As a result, it is immune to the criticisms facing explanatory reductionism. This conception of unity is also importantly different from the view that science is disunified, and I conclude by demonstrating how it accords better with scientific practice than do conceptions of the disunity of science. (shrink)

Among the most promising options for vindicating Oppenheim and Putnam’s unity of science hypothesis is the ‘Mentaculus’ of Albert and Loewer. I assess whether this promise can be borne out. My focus is on whether the Mentaculus can deliver what Oppenheim and Putnam call the ‘unity of laws’: the reduction of special science laws to the laws of fundamental physics. I conclude that although the Mentaculus may support a fairly strong form of reductionism, it falls short of upholding (...) the unity of laws. (shrink)

ABSTRACTCommentators have commonly noted the metaphysical role of participation in Richard Hooker’s Of the Lawes of Ecclesiastical Polity: participation both describes how creation is suspended from God and also how believers share in Christ through grace. Yet, the role in Hooker’s thought of the attendant Platonic language of ‘between’ and ‘desire’ has not received sustained attention. Metaxu describes the ‘in-between’ quality of participation: the participant and the participated remain distinct but are dynamically related as the former originates from and returns (...) to the perfection of the latter. Within this metaxological dynamic, desire acts as the physical and psychic motor driving the move between potentiality and perfect actuality, that is to say from multiplicity to divine unity: desire aims at goodness and so ultimately tends towards that which is goodness itself, namely God’s nature. For Hooker, desire becomes couched in amorous affectivity and has an erotic register. This essay explores, then, how Hooker appeals to a language of ‘between’ and ‘desire’ within his accounts of participation. First, it examines how human beings exist between the footstool and throne of God in Hooker’s legal ontology. Here, angelic desire acts as a hierarchical pattern of and spur to erotic participation in the divine nature. Second, this essay examines how theurgy transforms desire in Hooker’s account of liturgical participation as a redemptive commerce between heaven and earth. Here, angels still act as invisible, hierarchical intermediaries within earthly worship, but soon give way to immediate grace through participation in Christ within the sacraments. (shrink)

:This paper traces the early reflections of the pre-Critical Kant on laws of nature back to Newton’s governing conception of laws. Three problems with the Newtonian conception are identified. I argue that in the attempt to provide a solution to them, in 1763 Kant came to forge a novel governing conception of laws. Key to Kant’s novel view are the notions of ground and its determinations. The role of these two notions in delivering the nomological necessity, explanatory power, and (...) class='Hi'>unity of the laws of nature is discussed and analysed. (shrink)

Written by leading philosophers and lawyers from the United States and the United Kingdom, this collection of original essays offers new insights into the doctrines that make up the general part of the criminal law. It sheds theoretical light on the diversity and unity of the general part and advances our understanding of such key issues as criminalisation, omissions, voluntary actions, knowledge, belief, reckelssness, duress, self-defence, entrapment and officially-induced mistake of law.

The paper addresses the question of how the unity of science can adequately be characterized. A mere classification of scientific fields and disciplines does not express the unity of science unless it is supplemented with a perspective that establishes a systematic coherence among the different branches of science. Four ideas of this kind are discussed. Namely, the unity of scientific language, of scientific laws, of scientific method and of science as a practical‐operational enterprise. Whereas reference to the (...) unity of scientific language and of scientific laws does not provide a viable basis for the unity of science, the methodological and practical unity might. The unity of science can be characterized by the way in which methodological criteria enter into the assessment or evaluation of theories, and, moreover, by a transdisciplin‐ary approach to problems. Accordingly, the unity of science is not expressed by theoretical uniformity but by the unity of scientific practice. (shrink)

Abstract According to John Dupré, the metaphysics underpinning modern science posits a deterministic, fully law?governed and potentially fully intelligible structure that pervades the entire universe. To reject such a metaphysical framework for science is to subscribe to ?the disorder of things?, and the latter, according to Dupré, entails the impossibility of a unified science. Dupré's argument rests crucially upon purported disunities evident in the explanatory practices of science. I critically examine the implied project of drawing metaphysical conclusions from epistemological premisses (...) concerning the nature of our explanatory practices. I then argue that Dupré fails to answer a particular argument for the ontological unity of science that rests upon assumptions about the causal structure of the world. This ?causal? argument for the unity of science might be countered by a more radical metaphysical revisionism. The latter, however, seems unable to account for features of our explanatory practices that testify to a measure of explanatory unity in science. I conclude by sketching a strategy that might enable the revisionist to overcome such difficulties. (shrink)

There have been many discussions on problems of logic over the past several years. While the problem of the nature of the law of contradiction, one of the laws of formal logic, has received particular attention by everyone, the question has not been posed very precisely in the arguments. Actually, the question is not whether the movement, change, and development of things can be reflected in consciousness by use of the methods of formal logic, or in distinguishing the effectiveness of (...) the law of contradiction in disputation, proofs, or theoretical systems from its effectiveness in the general process of cognition, when applied to phenomena. If the development of reality cannot at all be reflected by the use of the logical tools of formal logic, what use do they have? No one denies that formal logic does not suffice as a method of cognition. If, in disputations and proofs, or in the establishment of theoretical systems, one relies only on the logical tools of formal logic, this is also not enough. The scope of applicability of the laws of formal logic, as laws that are studied by a concrete science, is necessarily limited. It is impossible for them to be all-powerful; it is of course impossible, relying on the law of contradiction, to know and grasp the contradictions in reality — the unity and conflict of opposites. All disputations and proofs, and the establishment of theoretical systems, are, in fact, efforts to know real objects, efforts of the subjective to grasp the objective. In principle, the use of formal logic in disputations and proofs and in the establishment of theoretical systems, and its use in knowing an object, should be no different. What, then, is the question? The question should be posed as follows: can thought contravene the law of contradiction? (shrink)

"In the closing chapters of Ezekiel, a great Temple is described, one reminiscent of Solomon's but in fact like none ever built. From that Temple, a river flows through the land, with healing in its wake; within the Temple dwells the divine Glory, depicted here alone in Ezekiel as coming to rest, never again to be removed. All of these features of Ezekiel's grand vision are embedded in the core of Jewish and Christian devotional and mystical practice. Yet no less (...) intriguing for the exegete is the legislation promulgated in this elaborate vision report. Here is found the only body of law in the Hebrew Scriptures not placed in the mouth of Moses. Laws regarding sacrifices and festivals, the conduct of the prince, the nature of the priesthood, and the division of the land all center upon the Temple, which is the one common reference for this rich, multifaceted material." From Chapter 1: The Unity and Theme of the Temple Vision. (shrink)

In two recent articles I offered a solution to an old problem in Kant’s account of the categorical imperative, that of finding a unitary interpretation of all four of the Groundwork’s applications of the Formula of the Law of Nature. In this article I bring out the unity of this solution and defend the principle of suitability interpretation of FLN from objections raised by Samuel Kahn.

Unity of science was once a very popular idea among both philosophers and scientists. But it has fallen out of fashion, largely because of its association with reductionism and the challenge from multiple realisation. Pluralism and the disunity of science are the new norm, and higher-level natural kinds and special science laws are considered to have an important role in scientific practice. What kind of reductionism does multiple realisability challenge? What does it take to reduce one phenomenon to another? (...) How do we determine which kinds are natural? What is the ontological basis of unity? In this Element, Tuomas Tahko examines these questions from a contemporary perspective, after a historical overview. The upshot is that there is still value in the idea of a unity of science. We can combine a modest sense of unity with pluralism and give an ontological analysis of unity in terms of natural kind monism. This title is available as Open Access on Cambridge Core. (shrink)

A critical analysis of Kelsen’s theory leads to a broad concept of custom, which covers diverse types of customary norms, where the always required conviction of legal bindingness depends on different types of factual and normative reasons. In it we should include a strict concept of custom or legal usage, derogating custom, custom of general international law, custom that establishes an unwritten constitution, custom that establishes a new written constitution, judicial custom which creates a rule of precedent and custom newly (...) expressed in the judicial application of customary rules. The basic norm could be formulated as a constitutive norm: ‘If the norms created through the first historical constitution are effective, then the first historical constitution are valid.’ It is thus a customary constitutive rule that recognizes the first historical constitution as valid law. Norms which establish sources of law are constitutive rules, they can be customary norms or legislated norms, but if they are legislated, they have their validity recognized by, directly or indirectly, a constitutive customary norm. By using a broad concept of custom as a conventional practice, Hart implies that general recognition of a customary rule, together with the practice that accompanies it, are sufficient conditions of validity. A doctrine of recognition that is arrived at by means of criticism and a rational reconstruction of the doctrines of Kelsen and Hart regains the essential theses of the traditional recognition theory of Bierling and Engisch. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin’s new book, Justice for Hedgehogs, covers an extremely broad range of philosophical issues. However, its central thesis—the ‘unity of value thesis’—is that conflicts between moral or ethical values are merely apparent and that those values are, in fact, integrated and mutually supporting. Dworkin offers several arguments in support of this thesis, but, in this review, I focus on his attempt to illustrate the unity of value thesis by showing that the best account of certain key values (...) reveals them to be integrated and mutually supporting. I contend that this strategy is more promising than one might initially think, but that it breaks down when we consider the relationship between law and justice. For Dworkin, law is a value and his account of law entails that it can conflict with justice. Moreover, he seems precluded from developing an alternative account of law that does not give rise to such conflicts. However, while these conclusions weaken Dworkin’s case for the unity of value thesis, they do not suffice to refute it. (shrink)

In this paper, I present a conception of individual religiousness in terms of religious experience. Using ideas of the early Friedrich Schleiermacher, I will claim that religious experiences are contemplative experiences of the totality of being. This understanding of religious experiences presents an alternative to how religious experience is often epistemologically thought about in the more contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Furthermore, it has systematic advantages: It can construe religious plurality in terms of different ways to experience the totality of (...) being, it stays neutral to metaphysical and moral debates such as whether there is a God whose laws we should obey, and it allows for an explanation of how religious intuitions and religious emotions relate to one another as well as of why religiousness and art often go hand in hand. Even though understanding religiousness in terms of contemplative experience also bears revisionary potential, I will discuss how more doxastic elements of religious people’s lives can be reintegrated into this picture. (shrink)

In my original confrontation with Kant’s first Critique, although essentially sympathetic with its import, I found myself deploring his use of certain expressions such as “things in themselves,” “noumena,” “intuitive understanding,” “supersensible,” etc. It seemed to me that he could have made his basically positivistic point without calling up vestiges of absolute realities or eternal verities. When I turned to his second critical enterprise, it sometimes seemed as if he were letting God, freedom, and immortality step in the philosophical back (...) door, warranted by the rather vague argument of the transcendental deduction of the moral law which supposedly provided “practical reality” for the transcendental ideas of pure reason. My puzzlement was compounded by his need for a practical “typik” and the notion that practical reason somehow required the realization of unconditional moral ideals in the conditioned sensible world. Perhaps somewhat like Kant himself, I felt that something was missing. There was a kind of gap or void which needed filling in by something which would not only dispel any reservations about some of the language of the first two Critiques, but would also interrelate the two independent realms of nature and freedom in some intelligible way such that any suspicions of a philosophically irreducible dualism could be erased, while still recognizing theory and practice as autonomous functions of the single faculty of intelligence. But what kind of “unity” could we expect? Although the two analyses were logically compatible, each seemed to stand on its own and there was no mutual implication between them. It was as if each went wrong not in respect to its own foundation but in respect to what it said about the other. Kant presents a defensible theory of knowledge which says some very strange things about logically possible, nonempirical entities; and then this is followed by a systematic ethical theory which occasionally makes odd assertions about empirical nature. (shrink)

In spite of its title, this volume sheds no new light on the debated problem of whether Peirce's ideas form, or can be reconstructed to form, an integrated and internally consistent system. The book, instead, avoids the problem entirely, the pith of its thesis about the unity of Peirce's philosophy being that, in various guises, the notion of Thirdness permeates his thought. Apparently, Haas thinks it evident that to point up the central role of this notion in each of (...) Peirce's subdivisions of philosophy—Phenomenology, Logic, and Metaphysics—is to show the unity of the philosophy as a whole. But he does not counter any specific charges brought against this claim of unity—though he mentions some of them—or even outline how the conception of law is to vindicate this claim. What he does do, following Peirce's three-fold division of philosophy, is to conduct a survey built around the Firstness-Secondness-Thirdness theme; and this exposition, though uncritical, is not lacking in care and subtlety, so that those looking for an overview of Peirce's thought can profit from the book.—C. T. W. (shrink)

Kant's views on the laws of nature in the physical and life sciences.

In this paper I take up the question about the unity of justice in Aristotle and advocate for a robust relationship between lawfulness and equality, the two senses of justice that Aristotle distinguishes in Nicomachean Ethics V. My strategy is to focus on Aristotle’s indication in NE V 2 that “other-relatedness” is the common element shared by the two justices and turn to Aristotle’s discussion of the notion of self-love in EN IX 8 to explain what that means. I (...) argue that the other-relatedness of justice can be characterized in terms of proper self-love. Concretely, the discussion of self-love makes clear that those who are concerned with the well-being of others in their community over their own material gain—i.e., those who are lawful and not grasping or pleonectic—are able to see that their own self-interest is in harmony with acting in benefit of their community. This shows that there is an intimate link between lacking pleonectic inclinations and being able to act for the sake of the common good—and in general, between lacking pleonectic inclinations and being virtuous in relation to others. (shrink)

Since there is a hierarchy in levels of the organization of the world (in, for example, its social, biological, physical and cosmic aspects) there is a plurality of aspects of scientific philosophy, each of which takes its bearings from this or that level of the organization of the world. This means that when speaking about the laws of philosophy, it is necessary to specify which aspect is being spoken about. In the course of my argument my guideline is the highest, (...) or cosmic world, but I shall also use examples from the physical world. The first law of philosophy of the cosmic world is: each being has a single basis. (It realizes this basis of itself, i.e. it is a primary basis). The first law of the philosophy of the physical world can be stated as follows: all physical being is unique. The second law of philosophy of the cosmic world is: the basis of all being is active to the point of self-excitement. It is manifest and demonstrable of itself, fracturing unity into multiplicity. The second law of the philosophy of the physical world can be stated as follows: all physical being is active and excitable. The third law of the philosophy of the cosmic world is: the basis of all being excites itself unevenly. The third law of philosophy of the physical world can be stated as follows: every physical being changes by a conversion leap. These then are the three laws of the philosophy of the cosmic and physical worlds: uniqueness, activity, and leap. I end by showing how laws of cosmic ethics and a cosmic aesthetics follow from the laws of the philosophy of the cosmic world. (shrink)

Legal tech is growing, and its growth provokes anxieties about the future of the legal profession as such. In this article, we examine the impact of legal tech on the central role of lawyers at law firms in crafting an imagined ‘right legal answer’ by drawing on Duncan Kennedy’s suggestion that a claim to the rightness of one’s legal propositions is a central characteristic of the legal profession. We first ask how changes in the organisation of legal services affect the (...) ability of lawyers at law firms to produce that ‘right legal answer’. While legal tech only exacerbates already ongoing processes of eradication of routine tasks, we find that it continues to mask the role of ideology in arriving at a right legal answer under a new layer of technological projection. Second, we ask how lawyers’ ability to produce ‘the right legal answer’ is affected by, first, expert systems and, second, a legal tech application named Bryter, representing a no-code system. We find that expert systems do not permit to uphold the unity of the lawyer required for Kennedy’s model of the right legal answer, but that no-code systems as Bryter do so. No-code systems can be reduced to a slogan: Have the lawyer, but evict her ideological temptations more efficiently than before! (shrink)

An enormous intellectual adventure. In this groundbreaking new book, the American biologist Edward O. Wilson, considered to be one of the world's greatest living scientists, argues for the fundamental unity of all knowledge and the need to search for consilience --the proof that everything in our world is organized in terms of a small number of fundamental natural laws that comprise the principles underlying every branch of learning. Professor Wilson, the pioneer of sociobiology and biodiversity, now once again breaks (...) out of the conventions of current thinking. He shows how and why our explosive rise in intellectual mastery of the truths of our universe has its roots in the ancient Greek concept of an intrinsic orderliness that governs our cosmos and the human species--a vision that found its apogee in the Age of Enlightenment, then gradually was lost in the increasing fragmentation and specialization of knowledge in the last two centuries. Drawing on the physical sciences and biology, anthropology, psychology, religion, philosophy, and the arts, Professor Wilson shows why the goals of the original Enlightenment are surging back to life, why they are reappearing on the very frontiers of science and humanistic scholarship, and how they are beginning to sketch themselves as the blueprint of our world as it most profoundly, elegantly, and excitingly is. (shrink)

In the Republic Plato describes the best city; in the Laws, he describes what he calls the ’second-best city’. I argue that Magnesia, the city of the Laws, is second-best because she fails to promulgate a single concept of human virtue that transcends the allegedly separate virtues of men and women. Magnesia institutionalizes philosophy in the Nocturnal Council to mitigate the consequent ethical flaws, but excludes women from the Council and thus from philosophic inquiry. I show that this exclusion of (...) women is itself a consequence of Magnesia's moral failings. In imperfect cities, of which Magnesia is supposedly the best, reform of women's status is thus only possible within limits, and those limits on the improvement of women's status are limits on the goodness of political life. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Piety, Justice, and the Unity of VirtueMark L. McPherranNo doubt the Socrates of the Euthyphro would be delighted to encounter many of its readers, offering as they do an audience of piety-seeking interlocutors, eager to mend the dialogical breach created by Euthyphro’s sudden departure. Socrates’ enthusiasm for this pursuit is at least as intense and comprehensible as theirs. We are told, after all, that he will never abandon (...) his quest for knowledge of “what the pious is” (15c–16a), since not only is this enterprise both pious and “inconceivably happy” (cf. Ap. 41c3–4) in itself,1 but coming to understand piety would allow one to “live better the rest of one’s life,” (15e7–16a4), especially should its continuation be threatened by a charge of impiety (3b–d, 5a–c, 12e, 15e–16a).2 My own search here is no less happy and ambitious, since I wish to uncover Socrates’ own, implicit understanding of piety and its relation to his claim elsewhere that “the virtues are one.”3 The account of this I shall provide will also touch on Platonic piety, although this notion obviously rests on a tendentious distinction. Nevertheless, there do seem to be some interesting differences between the way piety is treated in elenctic dialogues such as the Euthyphro and Protagoras, and the more explicitly theory-laden, constructive works such as the Republic and Laws. I shall later characterize [End Page 299] these differences, primarily in terms of the more carefully articulated, internalist moral psychology of the Republic.42. SOCRATIC PIETYThe distinct phenomena the term “religion” popularly designates for us were for the Greeks seamlessly integrated into everyday life. Thus, it is natural that the term “piety”—εὐσέβεια—carried a wider sense than our English equivalent commonly does: it concerned not only one’s immediate relation to the gods—emphasizing proper religious conduct and carrying a sense of respect and fear towards divinity (concomitant with a grasp of one’s own mortal limits)—but also often designated appropriate behavior towards parents, native land, and the dead.5 It is to this rough, inclusive conception of piety that Euthyphro appeals when confronted by Socrates on the Porch of the King (2a–6a). Moreover, and despite his own shockingly irreverent attempt at father-bashing and the subsequent elenctic drubbing he then receives from Socrates, toward the close of the dialogue Euthyphro still manages to envision piety in the quasi-traditionalist fashion with which he began—as “a knowledge of how to ensure the preservation of families and states by gratifying the gods through proper prayer and sacrifice” (14b; cf. 14c–15c).6 It is, however, precisely [End Page 300] at this dramatic juncture (14a–c) that we find—arguably—the final elements of a Socratically-acceptable conception of piety; one that builds upon Euthyphro’s initial concession to Socrates that piety and “human justice” are to be distinguished from one another (11e–12e). This, in turn, is a move that in principle forces Euthyphro to disengage from those aspects of the traditional conception of piety which would—from Socrates’ perspective—conflate the two.7 Recent challenges to this reading, however, have seen in Euthyphro’s initial holism not the heterogeneous presumptions of popular thought, but a semi-sophisticated grasp of the Socratic unity of the virtues.8 And since it does appear that the character Euthyphro is designed to serve not only as a hubristically-inflated, Homeric “fundamentalist,” but as an odd and Sophistically-influenced doppelgänger of Socrates as well—a lesson, that is, in what Socrates both is and is not—it now seems worthwhile to reexamine the view that Socratic piety is but a part and not the whole of justice.9Turning to our text, then, we discover that following the failure of Euthyphro’s initial definitional attempts to specify the nature of pious action and the resulting aporetic interlude, Socrates is willing to offer Euthyphro renewed assistance (11e1–4). This he does by asking whether all the just is pious, or whether justice is broader than piety such that piety is then merely a “part” (μóϱιον) of justice (11e4–12e5). Subsequent to his explanation of these alternatives, Socrates... (shrink)

This essay proposes a very important general account of Kant's critical philosophy. Avowing her debts to recent scholarship stressing themes of practical reason, freedom, history, and teleology as central to Kant's philosophical project, Neiman goes further than previous writers in elaborating the critical definition of "reason." Her principal claims are that: Kant's chief concern is to reconceive the nature of reason as the source of regulative ideas giving purpose and structure to all human activity, rather than as cognitive ; insisting (...) on the regulative nature of reason permits Kant to grasp the unity of the theoretical and the practical, or of metaphysics and ethics ; reason as regulative proposes projects for thinking about the world as a systematic whole of connections uniting while transcending the given objects of experience ; reason's capacity for transcending the given toward never-fully realized wholes shows that it is a faculty of ends and that as such its essence is freedom ; to say that practical reason has "primacy" over theoretical reason is not to say that morality provides an extension of knowledge denied to theory, but that the essence of all reason is practical, and therefore that speculative accounts of its goals and foundations are necessarily false ; the synthesis of objects by the understanding is subordinated to reason as the power of end-determination, since no science arises from the- understanding alone, and only reason can direct the understanding toward a unified system of empirical laws ; earlier philosophy mistakenly supposes that reason's desire to seek the unconditioned has a theoretical basis and satisfaction, whereas both are actually practical. (shrink)

At Statesman (Plt.) 291a–c and 303c–d, Plato compares the so-called statesmen of all existing constitutions to a motley crew of lions, centaurs, satyrs, and other beasts, and the entire section of the Statesman devoted to law and constitutions (291c–303c) to a satyr-play of sorts. This paper argues that these thought-provoking images are best understood as literary devices which, in addition to other dramatic elements in the Theaetetus and Sophist, help to bolster the unity of the Theaetetus-Sophist-Statesman trilogy and its (...) apologetic agenda concerning Socrates. (shrink)

This article explains the apparent tension between Hobbes' late work A Dialogue between A Philosopher and A Student of the Common Laws of England and his avowed goal of a deductive philosophy which eschews rhetoric and history, by analysing the difference between Hobbes' civil and natural philosophy. A Dialogue's simultaneous use of deduction, rhetoric, and historical citation is congruent with the method applied by Hobbes in Leviathan in order to construct his "civil philosophy". This highlights Hobbes' awareness increasing with the (...) years of the difference between the teachings of "natural philosophy" which are understood by demonstration, and once this is done are evident per se, and those of politics and jurisprudence which in order to make the people obey the sovereign maintaining peace and security, may require employing the language of persuasion before and after being demonstrated. However, I have argued that the awareness of this difference does not undermine the general unity of his philosophical system and in particular of his notion of science. (shrink)

Normic laws have the form "if A, then normally B". This paper attempts to show that if a philosophical analysis of normic laws (1, 4) is combined with certain developments in nonmono- tonic logic (2, 3), the following problems in philosophy of science can be seen in a new pers- pective which, at least in many cases, allows to improve their received analysis: explanation and individual case understanding in the humanities (1, 2), an evolution-theoretic foundation of normic laws which explains (...) their omnipresence and establishes a the connection between prototypi- cal and statstical normality, (¤4), ceteris paribus laws (¤5), differences between physical versus non-physical sciences (¤6) and finally, theory-protection through auxiliary hypotheses (¤7). (shrink)

It is still underestimated to what extent in his main works Hugo Grotius not only sketched and developed a system of private, state and international law; but also outlined a general philosophy or theory of law. By asking questions concerning the law of property, the law of prize and booty, the law of peace and war or the legal status of sovereignty he did not only refer to the 'right side', i.e. to actions that can be labelled as rightful and (...) legal. He also dealt with many aspects of what is not right and unlawful, not limiting himself to just give mere examples of crossing the border to the 'non right side'. It was a part of Grotius's methodological approach to systematically reflect on the law from the perspective of its violations. One example of such a violation is the act of piracy and the figure of the pirate. To outline this is the aim of the following article. By showing that the pirate and his 'legal twin', the privateer, were belong together as two sides of the same coin, they come to symbolise in an exemplary way the differentiation between 'right' and 'non right' as the unity of law in the legal philosophy of Grotius. (shrink)

This book's aims are to determine the importance of legal philosophy in legal education and in addition to develop alternative methods for teaching law in general and the philosophy of law in particular. In this context, the individual essays in this volume discuss the alternatives and tendencies in the quest for an adequate model of teaching and learning jurisprudence. Common to all of them is a commitment to the necessary integration of theoretical and practical knowledge, of traditional case and lecture (...) methods with non-traditional models such as cinema, drama, and literature, and of the dominant legal perspective with alternative approaches utilizing information technologies such as computers and the internet. Effective teaching and learning must favor critical and strategic thinking, dialectical and dialogical inquiry or research, problem-solving, role-playing, and skill-developing over mere rote memorization of existing rules and standard answers. (shrink)

It has been argued that the fundamental laws of physics are deceitful in that they give the impression of greater unity and coherence in our theories than is actually found to be the case. Causal stories and phenomenological relationships are claimed to provide a more acceptable account of the world, and only theoretical entities — not laws — are considered as perhaps corresponding to real features of the world.This paper examines these claims in the light of the author's own (...) field of research: high energy physics. Some of the distinctions upon which the above conclusions are based are found not to be tenable in practice. Examples from experimental particle physics are presented which suggest an important role of the underlying theoretical structure which cannot be overlooked. It is argued that the fundamental theories must, in fact, be treated as being as worthy or unworthy of ontological commitment as the entities they postulate or the phenomenological relationships they inspire. Whilst it is conceded that aspects of the current theoretical formalism belie literal interpretation, it is maintained that revision in these particular areas need not affect the symmetry principles, particle spectra, or coupling strengths that largely determine the empirical content of the theory. (shrink)