Popular images of rights almost always emphasize their protective qualities. But who is really protected? In this paper it is argued that contemporary rights talk, because of faulty underlying assumptions, systematically favors prejudice and big property interests. Further, once the mistaken assumptions are surrendered, and it is realized that all rights are affirmative, a less systematically misleading debate can be created within the realm of rights discourse.

Fact checking has become a prominent facet of political news coverage, but it employs a variety of objectionable methodological practices, such as treating a statement containing multiple facts as if it were a single fact and categorizing as accurate or inaccurate predictions of events yet to occur. These practices share the tacit presupposition that there cannot be genuine political debate about facts, because facts are unambiguous and not subject to interpretation. Therefore, when the black-and-white facts—as they appear to the fact (...) checkers—conflict with the claims produced by politicians, the fact checkers are able to see only (to one degree or another) “lies.” The examples of dubious fact-checking practices that we discuss show the untenability of the naïve political epistemology at work in the fact-checking branch of journalism. They may also call into question the same epistemology in journalism at large, and in politics. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Future of Sexual Difference: An Interview with Judith Butler and Drucilla Cornell*Pheng Cheah (bio) and Elizabeth Grrosz (bio)EG:Luce Irigaray’s writings have always figured strongly in your works, probably more than in the work of other American feminist theorists. Out of all the feminist theorists you both interrogate, she seems to emerge as a kind of touchstone of the feminist ethical, political, and intellectual concerns to which you (...) seem to aspire. Could each of you briefly outline how she figures in your work, whether your relations to her have changed, and if so, how?JB:I think that probably early on, when I started working on French feminism as a graduate student in the early ‘80s, I was not interested in her at all because she seemed to me to be an essentialist and that was a term we used quite easily then, when we thought we knew what it meant. In the late ‘80s, I started to rethink my objections to her on that basis and found that she was, among the feminist theorists I had read, perhaps the most versed in philosophy and that her engagement with philosophy was a curious mixture of both loyalty and aggression. And it became very interesting to me when I started thinking about her whole practice of critical mimesis—what she was doing when she was reading Freud, what was she doing when she was reading Plato—and I read Speculum again and again, frightened by its anger, compelled by the closeness of the reading, confused by the mimetism of the text. Was she enslaved to these texts, was she displacing them radically, was she perhaps in the bind of being in both positions at the same time? And I realized that whatever the feminine was for her, it was not a substance, not a spiritual reality that might be isolated, but it had something to do with this strange practice of reading, one in which she was reading texts that she was not authorized to read, texts from which she was as a woman explicitly excluded or explicitly demeaned, and that she would read them anyway. And then the question is: what would it mean to read from a position of radical deauthorization in order to expose the contingent authority of the text? That struck me as a feminist critical practice, a critical reading practice that I could learn from, and from that point on, highly influenced by both Drucilla’s work and Naomi Schor’s work [see Schor], I started to read her quite thoroughly.PC:Is this kind of relationship that she has with the philosophers she reads a sexual relationship? I am thinking of some of the sexualized terms you just used: loyalty and aggression.JB:Yes, there is no doubt that there is an eros of a certain kind, usually the kind that frightens me, quite frankly. I think Carolyn Burke has made this argument that Irigaray [End Page 19] has a romance with the philosophers [see Burke]. I think she has a certain masochistic-sadistic erotic engagement with the philosophers.EG:Do you think it is sado-masochistic?JB:Well, I think it was much more aggressive in Speculum of the Other Woman than it became in An Ethics of Sexual Difference. There, I think there is an engagement that is still very difficult, but at least there is evidence of a more loving engagement.PC:I hope that we can return to the question of love at the end. Is this the kind of relationship that you have to her texts?JB:No, I’m probably too frightened. [Everybody laughs.] And I don’t engage them that closely, probably because I find it frightening to be in that particular knot. She doesn’t actually have a chapter in any of my books. I think I can’t quite devote a chapter to her....EG:No, but you devote large sections of chapters....JB:That’s true, but I can’t stay there for a prolonged period of time [laughs], whatever that’s worth.EG:I’d like to come back to this later, because I think it is a really interesting... (shrink)

This volume focuses on democratic experimentalism, gathering a collection of original and previously unpublished essays focusing upon its major outlines, as well as specific aspects ¿ both promising and troublesome - of this theoretical approach. Together these essays offer conceptions of democracy and democratic governance that emphasize and highlight experimentalist aspects of pragmatic thought, particularly Deweyan pragmatism, and its relationship to instantiation in concrete social and political institutions. Issues of democratic governance, political organization and the relationship of law to democracy (...) are analyzed. (shrink)

Sen argues that Rawls’ political theory suffers from the flaw of “institutional fundamentalism.” In response, he develops an alternate theory of justice that does not rely upon contractarian premises. I argue that Sen’s theory largely maps on to the insights of classic pragmatist thought. Further, the pragmatic tradition can help critique and supplement Sen’s project.

Joseph D. Anderson & Barbara Fisher Anderson Moving Image Theory: Ecological ConsiderationsCarbondale: Southern Illinois University Press.ISBN 0 8093 2599 3253pp.Pat Brereton Hollywood Utopia: Ecology in Contemporary American CinemaBristol: Intellect.ISBN 1 84150117 4270pp.

Popular images of rights almost always emphasize their protective qualities. But who is really protected? In this paper it is argued that contemporary rights talk, because of faulty underlying assumptions, systematically favors prejudice and big property interests. Further, once the mistaken assumptions are surrendered, and it is realized that all rights are affirmative, a less systematically misleading debate can be created within the realm of rights discourse.

In this volume, Alessandro Capone and Antonino Bucca’s essay makes a case, based upon the theory of pragmemes and socio-pragmatics, for taking Donald Trump’s statement to Comey, “I hope you will let Flynn go,” as an attempt of the President to get the then Federal Bureau of Investigation Director Comey to illegitimately drop the Russian probe, therefore being an illegal act of obstruction of justice. Their argument rests upon the claim that in this specific case, deniers of obstruction of justice (...) claims, when faced with Trump’s statements, must adopt a false theory of language in order to justify their conclusions. In his response, Richard Warner argues that though much of Capone and Bucca’s claims are convincing, and that much of the analysis of language in their article is accurate, even accepting their pragmeme and socio-pragmatic driven analysis, the content of Trump’s statement to Comey is not unequivocal enough to warrant certainty as to the obstruction claim. In this chapter one conclusion will be that Capone, Bucca and Warner all offer very important arguments useful in the accurate interpretation of Trump’s statement, and for interpretation in law generally. This conclusion will be supported and made more explicit by reading the essays in relation to Karl Llewellyn’s own constitutional theory, a theory that sees the constitution as an institution just partially, even minimally, based upon a purportedly “literal” reading of text. A further conclusion will be that theories of language, implicit or explicit, do indeed inevitably influence the analysis of statements like Trump’s at a very deep and profound level. Yet, thought this is all correct, I will argue that Trump’s statement, in context, cannot be read with such specificity so, in itself, it is sufficient evidence of obstruction of justice. (shrink)

Lochner represents a crucial case in American constitutional law. An investigation of the decision highlights important philosophical aspects of the place of law in a democratic society. Analysis of contemporary stances on Lochner, the actual Lochner opinion (including the dissents by Harlan and Holmes) and how judges following the legal philosophies of John Dewey, Ronald Dworkin and Richard Posner (“Dews,” “Dworks,” and “Poses”) would have decided the case shows that Dewey’s theory of law and democracy emerges as the most attractive (...) alternative. (shrink)

Ronald Dworkin in Law’s Empire famously utilized what he described as the “semantic sting” to explain both why the concept of “law” is an essentially contestable concept and because of this why the concept of law is also essentially interpretive. Ultimately Dworkin’s theory makes law and legal practice on all levels turn on, in his terms, an essentially semantic dispute over what the best conception of law is. That is, law is in all its worldly glory ultimately an interpretive concept (...) based upon a conception of meaning centered upon semantics. I argue that law is better analyzed as a set of embodied and socially embedded practices and that emphasis upon the interpretive or “semantic” aspects of law crowds out the more important behavioral and concrete aspects of legal practice. The claim in this chapter is simply that even the most sophisticated conceptual or semantic analysis of law in terms of a core set of concepts is indefensibly reductionist. If semantic theories of law have a tendency to crowd out the recognition of practices, of embodied social ways of life, then the real “semantic sting” is in accepting the semantic move, and not in any disagreement over how semantic content is to be identified. (shrink)