Human rights have become an important ideal in current times, yet our age has witnessed more violations of human rights than any previous less enlightened one. This book explores the historical and theoretical dimensions of this paradox. Divided into two parts, the first section offers an alternative history of natural law, in which natural rights are represented as the eternal human struggle to resist opression and to fight for a society in which people are no longer degraded or despised. At (...) the time of their birth in the 18th Century and again in the popular uprisings of the last decade, human rights became the dominant critique of law and society. The radical rhetoric of rights and its apparently endless expansive potential has led to its adoption by governments and individuals alike seeking to justify their actions on moral grounds and has undermined its radical edge. Part Two examines the philosophical logic of rights. The classical critiques of Kant, Burke, Hegel and Marx illuminate traditional aproaches to the concept of human rights. The work of Heidegger, Sartre and psychoanalysis is used to deconstruct the metaphisical essentialism of bothe universalists and cultural relativists. Finally, through a consideration of the ethics of otherness, and with reference to recent human rights violations, it is argued that the end of human rights is to judge law and politics from a moral stand point which both transcends the present and is historically relevant. (shrink)

Erudite and timely, this book is a key contribution to the renewal of radical theory and politics.

Jurisprudence is the prudence of jus, law's consciousness and conscience. Throughout history, when thinkers wanted to contemplate the organisation of society or the relationship between authority and the subject, they turned to law. All great philosophers, from Plato to Hobbes, Kant, Hegel, Marx and Weber had either studied the law or had a deep understanding of legal operations. But jurisprudence is also the conscience of law, the exploration of law's justice and of an ideal law or equity at the bar (...) of which state law is always judged. Jurisprudence brings together 'is' and 'ought', the positive and the normative, law and justice. But after a long process of decay, legal theory is today characterised by cognitive and moral poverty. Jurisprudence has become restricted and academically peripheral, a guidebook to technocratic legalism and a legitimation of the existent. Critical jurisprudence returns to the classical tradition of a general philosophy of law and adopts a much wider concept of legality. It is concerned both with posited law and with the law of the law. All legal aspects of the economic, political, emotional and physical modes of production and reproduction of society are part of critical jurisprudence. This widening of scope allows a radical rethinking of the nature of rights, justice, sovereignty and judgement. A political philosophy of justice today must examine the political economy of law; transitions from Empire to nation; ideological and imaginary constructions through which we understand ourselves and relate to others; ways in which gender, race or sexuality create forms of identity that both discipline bodies and offer sites of resistance. Law's complicity with political oppression, violence and racism has to be faced before it is possible to speak of a new beginning for legal thought, which in turn is the necessary precondition for a theory of justice. Critical Jurisprudence offers an ethics of law against the nihilism of power and an aesthetics of existence for the melancholic lawyer. (shrink)

This volume of essays traces the history of jurisprudence from classical times, and examines various interpretations of written laws.

Responding to Alain Badiou’s ‘communist hypothesis’, the leading political philosophers of the Left convened in London in 2009 to take part in a landmark conference to discuss the perpetual, persistent notion that, in a truly emancipated society, all things should be owned in common. This volume brings together their discussions on the philosophical and political import of the communist idea, highlighting both its continuing significance and the need to reconfigure the concept within a world marked by havoc and crisis.

This new study seeks to reopen the law-ethics debate from a postmodern perspective and calls for a radical reassessment of the relationship between law and morality.

Critical Legal Theory has conventionally been traced to the social, political, and philosophical movements of the 1960s and, before that, to the early-twentieth-century ‘realist’ critique of modern jurisprudence. In truth, however, its origins go back to classical and pre-modern thought, and to their acknowledgement of the centrality of law in attempts to conceive of the good life, or the just polity—a centrality that is, moreover, also discernible in the recent gravitation of a number of contemporary philosophers and theorists towards law. (...) Against the ‘restricted’ and ‘conservative’ character of modern jurisprudence, Critical Legal Theory constitutes a return to this more general interest in law and legality. Exceeding the limits of jurisprudence, it has, moreover, drawn upon the most ancient and most contemporary traditions of critical thought in order to pursue new ways of understanding, living, and imagining the law. Critical Legal Theory is now an established—if heterogeneous and controversial—field of study, represented by numerous international journals, regional organizations, and global conferences. As the field continues to flourish as never before, this new title in Routledge’s Major Works series, Critical Concepts in Law, meets the need for an authoritative reference work to make sense of a rapidly growing and ever more complex corpus of literature. Indeed, it is a landmark collection of Critical Legal Theory’s principal sources, orientations, movements, and themes. The first volume in the collection illuminates the foundations of Critical Legal Theory in contemporary continental thought, as well as providing an account of its institutional history. Volume II, meanwhile, examines the ways in which Critical Legal Theory has addressed and problematized conventional jurisprudential ideas about law, drawing upon the insights of philosophy, as well as other disciplines. Volume III assembles the best and most influential research to provide an overview of the movements that characterize the field. The scholarship assembled in the final volume brings together the key work to explore a range of substantial themes with which Critical Legal Theorists have engaged. Supplemented with a full index and comprehensive introductions, newly written by the editors, which situate the collected material in the context of more general theoretical traditions, as well as in critical relation to jurisprudence, _Critical Legal Theory_ is destined to be valued by scholars, students, and researchers as a vital resource. (shrink)

Questioning some of the repetitive and narrow theoretical writings on rights, a group of leading intellectuals examine human rights from philosophical, theological, historical, literary and political perspectives.

The concept of fitness, central to population genetics and to the synthetic theory of evolution, is discussed. After a historical introduction on the origin of this concept, the current meaning of it in population genetics is examined: a cause of the selective process and its quantification. Several difficulties arise for its exact definition. Three adequacy criteria for such a definition are formulated. It is shown that it is impossible to formulate an adequate definition of fitness respecting these criteria. The propensity (...) definition of fitness is presented and rejected. Finally it is argued that fitness is a conceptual device, a useful tool, only for descriptive purposes of selective processes, changing from case to case, and thus devoid of any substantial physical counterpart. Any attempt to its reification is an apport to the metaphysical load evolutionary theory has inherited from Natural Theology. (shrink)

The current crisis is one outcome of the financialisation of contemporary capitalism. It arose in the USA because of the enormous expansion of mortgage-lending, including to the poorest layers of the working class. It became general because of the trading of debt by financial institutions. These phenomena are integral to financialisation. During the last three decades, large enterprises have turned to open markets to obtain finance, forcing banks to seek alternative sources of profit. One avenue has been provision of financial (...) services to individual workers. This trend has been facilitated by the retreat of public provision from housing, pensions, education, and so on. A further avenue has been to adopt investment-banking practices in open financial markets. The extraction of financial profits directly out of personal income constitutes financial expropriation. Combined with investment-banking, it has catalysed the current gigantic crisis. More broadly, financialisation has sustained the emergence of new layers of rentiers, defined primarily through their relation to the financial system rather than ownership of loanable capital. Finally, financialisation has posed important questions regarding finance-capital and imperialism. (shrink)

The aim of this essay is to present a reading of Plato's utopianism, as expressed mainly through the 'big letters' of the Republic, which will lead us beyond Karl Popper's and Leo Strauss' modernist understandings of Plato and of his world. The author argues that, despite the 'transcendent' aspects of Platonic utopianism, the ideal city should be understood neither as a blueprint to be realized through some totalitarian political project nor as a mere fiction that cannot by definition give rise (...) to a viable existential prospect. The power of Platonic utopianism lies in its articulation to a value-laden cosmological continuum, which may be understood in terms of the self-instituting (through political persuasion and story-telling activites, among others) capacities of ancient Greek city. The utopian perspective is marked by shareability of political reason and by mutuality between participants in a common discursive venture rather than by individualist authoritarian projections or by harmless (that is, non-political in it orientation and ideological in its repercussions) day-dreaming. Even if Plato's philosophical project aspires to transcend the boundaries of ancient Greek cosmos, Platonic politics cannot be separated from its historical context, that is, the circumstances that gave rise to philosophy as a silent perhaps, but revolutionary, in it intentions political act. (shrink)

It is becoming clear that many of today’s management theories are inadequate theoretically and practically to move understanding, scholarship, and practice to where it needs to be for scholars, business leaders, and policy makers to cope with an increasing fraught world. This Special Issue’s focus is on sustainability. Sustainability challenges need to incorporate multidisciplinary interventions and the trans- and interdisciplinary nature of solutions. To actively seek transformation toward sustainability, fundamental and innovative short-term as well as long-term efforts are required in (...) society, economy, technology, and education, including our understanding of human behavior and attitudes toward the management of the environment. This introductory piece presents natural science theories as a promising approach for achieving progress toward transformation for sustainability. (shrink)

entry for the Entry for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, 2007.

The issue of what consequences to draw from the existence of non-classical logical systems has been the subject of an interesting debate across a diversity of fields. In this paper the matter of alternative logics is considered with reference to a specific belief system and its propositions :the Azande are said to maintain beliefs about witchcraft which, when expressed propositionally, appear to be inconsistent. When the Azande have been presented with such inconsistencies, they either fail to see them as such (...) or else accept them as non-problematical. Is our knowledge of logical truths a relative and culturally determined phenomenon, or is there some (transcendent) criterion that allows us to adjudicate between alternative logical systems? The authors propose an approach for resolving disputes about the status of Azande reasoning which assumes a paraconsistent framework, thus providing a new perspective on this debate. (shrink)

The paper focuses on extending to the first order case the semantical program for modalities first introduced by Dana Scott and Richard Montague. We focus on the study of neighborhood frames with constant domains and we offer in the first part of the paper a series of new completeness results for salient classical systems of first order modal logic. Among other results we show that it is possible to prove strong completeness results for normal systems without the Barcan Formula (like (...) FOL + K)in terms of neighborhood frames with constant domains. The first order models we present permit the study of many epistemic modalities recently proposed in computer science as well as the development of adequate models for monadic operators of high probability. Models of this type are either difficult of impossible to build in terms of relational Kripkean semantics [40].We conclude by introducing general first order neighborhood frames with constant domains and we offer a general completeness result for the entire family of classical first order modal systems in terms of them, circumventing some well-known problems of propositional and first order neighborhood semantics (mainly the fact that many classical modal logics are incomplete with respect to an unmodified version of either neighborhood or relational frames). We argue that the semantical program that thus arises offers the first complete semantic unification of the family of classical first order modal logics. (shrink)

One of the central elements of John Rawls’ argument in support of his two principles of justice is the intuitive normative ideal of citizens as free and equal. But taken in isolation, the claim that citizens are to be treated as free and equal is extremely indeterminate, and has virtually no clear implications for policy. In order to remedy this, the two principles of justice, together with the stipulation that citizens have basic interests in developing their moral capacities and pursuing (...) their conceptions of the good life, are meant to provide a more precise interpretation of what is involved in treating citizens as free and equal. Rawls’ critics, however, have argued that satisfying the two principles of justice is not the most appropriate or plausible way to respect the status of citizens as free and equal. In relation to this debate, the present paper has two aims. The first is to examine Rawls’ account of the type of freedom that a just society must guarantee equally to its citizens. I will argue that those who think of Rawls as a theorist of freedom as non-interference are mistaken, because his notion of liberty resembles in important respects the republican notion of freedom as non-domination. Second, I will consider the extent to which Rawls’ principles of justice successfully protect the freedom as non-domination of all citizens so as to effectively treat them as free and equal. (shrink)

Journal of Philosophical Logic 34, 97-119, 2005.

In this paper we provide frame definability results for weak versions of classical modal axioms that can be expressed in Fitting's many-valued modal languages. These languages were introduced by M. Fitting in the early '90s and are built on Heyting algebras which serve as the space of truth values. The possible-worlds frames interpreting these languages are directed graphs whose edges are labelled with an element of the underlying Heyting algebra, providing us a form of many-valued accessibility relation. Weak axioms of (...) the form we treat here have been examined from the completeness perspective and further explored for applications in non-monotonic reasoning. Here, we introduce more weak many-valued modal axioms and prove a frame correspondence result for all of them. The classes of corresponding labelled frames possess algebraic properties which are strongly reminiscent of many classical ones, such as the Church-Rosser property, reflexivity, transitivity, partial functionality, etc. (shrink)

abstract In Political Liberalism and later work John Rawls has recast his theory of justice as fairness in political terms. In order to illustrate the advantages of a liberal political approach to justice over liberal non‐political ones, Rawls discusses what kind of education might be required for future citizens of pluralistic and democratic societies. He advocates a rather minimal conception of civic education that he claims to derive from political liberalism. One group of authors has sided with Rawls’ political perspective (...) and educational proposal, holding that a political approach and educational requirements that are not too demanding would have the advantage of being acceptable to a wide range of citizens with different religious, moral and philosophical perspectives. A second group of authors have criticized Rawls’ educational recommendations, holding that the production of a just society composed of reasonable citizens requires a more demanding civic education and, hence, that the political approach is not viable. The present paper argues that both groups are only partially right, and that there is a third way to understand civic education in Rawlsian terms, a way that is political but not minimal. (shrink)

We prove frame determination results for the family of many-valued modal logics introduced by M. Fitting in the early '90s. Each modal language of this family is based on a Heyting algebra, which serves as the space of truth values, and is interpreted on an interesting version of possible-worlds semantics: the modal frames are directed graphs whose edges are labelled with an element of the underlying Heyting algebra. We introduce interesting generalized forms of the classical axioms D, T, B, 4, (...) and 5 and prove that they are canonical for certain algebraic frame properties, which generalize seriality, reflexivity, symmetry, transitivity and euclideanness. Our results are quite general as they hold for any modal language built on a complete Heyting algebra. (shrink)

This study integrates corpus-assisted text analysis with frame semantics to study a social problem. Taking a cognitive-linguistic approach to critical discourse studies, in this article I examine the linguistic construction of minors in a corpus of 489 articles from the Uruguayan newspaper El País in the context of the so-called ‘Criminal Imputability Referendum’. Throughout, I focus on the construal operation of framing and identify a host of discursive patterns via which minors and adolescents are recurrently placed within the semantic frame (...) CRIME, and within this, they profile the frame elements of perpetrators of violent crimes rather than victims. I argue that, in the context of the referendum, these discursive strategies run the risk of facilitating the consolidation of a strong conceptual link whereby youth become readily associated with criminality, and are subservient to the political views of groups supporting a lower cut-off age for criminal responsibility and more stringent punishments. The observations arrived at in this instance set the foundations for a future experimental study testing whether the discursive patterns unearthed here have an effect on how readers conceptualize minors outside the texts. (shrink)

Defeasible conditionals are statements of the form ‘if A then normally B’. One plausible interpretation introduced in nonmonotonic reasoning dictates that ) is true iff B is true in ‘most’ A-worlds. In this paper, we investigate defeasible conditionals constructed upon a notion of ‘overwhelming majority’, defined as ‘truth in a cofinite subset of \’, the first infinite ordinal. One approach employs the modal logic of the frame \\), used in the temporal logic of discrete linear time. We introduce and investigate (...) conditionals, defined modally over \\); several modal definitions of the conditional connective are examined, with an emphasis on the nonmonotonic ones. An alternative interpretation of ‘majority’ as sets cofinal ) rather than cofinite ) is examined. For these modal approaches over \\), a decision procedure readily emerges, as the modal logic \ of this frame is well-known and a translation of the conditional sentences can be mechanically checked for validity; this allows also for a quick proof of \-completeness of the satisfiability problem for these logics. A second approach employs the conditional version of Scott-Montague semantics, in the form of \-many possible worlds, endowed with neighborhoods populated by collections of cofinite subsets of \. This approach gives rise to weak conditional logics, as expected. The relative strength of the conditionals introduced is compared to KLM logics and other conditional logics in the literature. (shrink)

We investigate the higher-order modal logic , which is a variant of the system presented in our previous work. A semantics for that system, founded on the theory of quasi sets, is outlined. We show how such a semantics, motivated by the very intuitive base of Schrödinger logics, provides an alternative way to formalize some intensional concepts and features which have been used in recent discussions on the logical foundations of quantum mechanics; for example, that some terms like 'electron' have (...) no precise reference and that 'identical' particles cannot be named unambiguously. In the last section, we sketch a classical semantics for quasi set theory. (shrink)

This article examines the relevance of a theory of the multinational state for the evaluation of claims for self-determination and secession. Considerations of ?ethnocultural justice? imply that the recognition of the multinational character of a state ? or the granting of some of the minority nations' demands ? is a matter of justice. If these requirements are not met, secession could be justified. Indeed, if secession needs a just cause (as it has been argued), a failure to build a truly (...) multinational arrangement can be a valid reason for a minority nation to secede. An approach like the one proposed would also contribute to the resolution of some of the key problems of the three main theories of secession and their appeals to nationalism, choice and remedial rights. (shrink)