In the wake of Brexit and Trump, the debate surrounding post-truth fills the newspapers and is at the center of the public debate. Democratic institutions and the rule of law have always been constructed and legitimized by discourses of truth. And so the issue of "post-truth" or "fake truth" can be regarded as a contemporary degeneration of that legitimacy. But what, precisely, is post-truth from a theoretical point of view? Can it actually change perceptions of law, of institutions and political (...) power? And can it affect our understanding of society and social relations? What are its ideological premises? What are the technical conditions that foster it? And most importantly, does it have anything to teach lovers of the truth? Pursuing an interdisciplinary perspective, this book gathers both well-known and newer scholars from a range of subject areas, to engage in a philosophical interrogation of the relationship between truth and law. (shrink)

Presenting legal and philosophical essays on money, this book explores the conditions according to which an object like a piece of paper, or an electronic signal, has come to be seen as having a value. Money plays a crucial role in the regulation of social relationships and their normative determination. It is thus integral to the very nature of the "social," and the question of how society is kept together by a network of agreements, conventions, exchanges, and codes. All of (...) which must be traced down. The technologies of money discussed here by Searle, Ferraris, and Condello show how we conceive the category of the social at the intersection of individual and collective intentionality, documentality, and materiality. All of these dimensions, as the introduction to this volume demonstrates, are of vital importance for legal theory and for a whole set of legal concepts that are crucial in reflections on the relationship between law, philosophy, and society. (shrink)

In this article I discuss the nature and sense of legal reasoning as reasonableness, i.e. as judgement and equilibrium between normativity and factuality, and as constant approximation between these two dimensions. By phrasing the intertwinement between legal hermeneutics and the nature and function of writing, the structure of the article is constructed so that the focus is on the changes currently occurring with the so-called ‘digital revolution’: in imagining a juridical system administrated through data analysis and algorithms, some contradictions emerge, (...) especially concerning the nature, sense and task of legal hermeneutics. The current shift of paradigm should be first of all addressed starting from the grammatological nature of the revolution at stake. Only from this perspective can the shift be entirely grasped and, at the same time, only from this perspective can the methodological conundrum be deconstructed. (shrink)

This article constitutes an attempt to reexamine a crucial issue of legal theory from the perspective of philosophy of language and of social ontology: by analyzing a jurisprudential case recently decided by the U.S. Supreme Court, we explain how Searle's account on rules in The Construction of Social Reality constitutes an important starting point for the clarification of the old jurisprudential debate between conventionalism and interpretivism. In a nutshell, we show that Searle's framework, while strictly conventionalist, makes it possible to (...) conceive of the distinction between the semantic content of rules and their extension, by drawing a parallel with the idea of “deep conventions” as well as with the semantic conventions in natural language. The paper thus touches on the broader problem of the relations between legal concepts and nonlegal values. (shrink)

In this paper we argue that hermeneutics acquires additional relevance in the era of technology. In particular legal hermeneutics offers examples of how the use of specific instruments aimed at constituting legal objects (like the digital instruments used by notaries) demonstrate that legal professions will never be entirely delegated to machines. The capacity to use the instruments and the very functioning of those instruments can never be detached from comprehension, and from legal savoir.

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2017 Heft: 216 Seiten: 89-107.

In questo articolo discuto la relazione tra diritto e giudizio nella prospettiva del rapporto tra l’inclusività della norma astratta e l’infinita possibilità e pluralità dei casi individuali concreti. Intendo concentrarmi sulla relazione tra diritto e giudizio nel momento in cui questa fuoriesce dalla sua sede intuitivamente naturale in ambito giuridico, cioè del giudizio in quanto luogo e tempo dell’atto del giudicare e del giudicato - per estendere l’analisi al rapporto tra realtà e normatività. In particolare lo scritto è organizzato in (...) tre sezioni: i. nella prima cerco di riprendere alcune moderne tendenze filosofiche intorno al giudizio per dare rilievo al tema nella sua complessità e necessità; ii. nella seconda, ricostruendo l’idea di dissidio elaborata da Lyotard, ne metto in rilievo il rapporto con la normatività giuridica; iii. nella terza parte collego il tema del giudizio con quello del dissidio e cerco di fondare una teoria della normatività giuridica basata non solo sulla norma positiva, ma anche e soprattutto sulla conflittualità intrinseca alle società contemporanee. Una conflittualità che emerge, si mostra e si risolve nel caso esemplare. (shrink)

Volume 10, Issue 3, September 2019, Page 452-456.

L’idea di ritornare a dialogare sul tema del giudizio è nata da alcune letture fatte prima a Parigi e poi a Roma. Ripartendo in particolare da un convegno tenutosi a Cerisy-La Salle – di cui pubblichiamo in questo volume gli interventi Judicieux dans le différend, di Jean-François Lyotard, e Dies Irae, di Jean-Luc Nancy – abbiamo deciso di riprendere quel dibattito per rispondere, in primo luogo, all’interesse crescente delle scienze umane per i temi del diritto e della giustizia; nonché, in...

Volume 10, Issue 3, September 2019, Page 452-456.