Law as Art presents a radical new legal theory, the Law as Art Hypothesis, which conceives law, not as a system of rules, but as a distinctive kind of art work. Law is differentiated as art by the Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis, which uses the heuristic metaphor of the Operatic Music Drama, the most elementally complex compound art form, to develop an idea of legal art as a distinctive empowered text, supported by the arts of drama, painting, sculpture, (...) dress-design, architecture, rhetoric and communication to form an elementally developed yet integrated unitary art work. Part I develops a new realist epistemology to support a contemporary action-type ontology of art, differentiated as art by virtue of its artistic value. Part II opens with a critical review of the arts in legal theory, before detailing the Law as Art and Law as Compound Artistic Type Hypothesis and locating them within contemporary scholarship. Legal philosophical implications are considered and there is an acronym key and glossary, bibliography and index. (shrink)

This essay focuses on the categerial expression of the metaphysics of ecstatic naturalism and the theology of deep pantheism. Naturalism, the theory that nature is all that there is, becomes the ecstatic form by stressing the continual fissuring between nature naturing and its potencies and nature natured seen as the innumerable orders of the world. Deep pantheism critiques the dualism of supernatural theism as well as the half-way theology of panentheism. Further, deep pantheism is “deep” because it focuses on the (...) churning abyss of the unconscious of nature and it’s archetypal potencies. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Eros as the Educational Principle of Democracy Kerry T.Burch. Feeling Power—emotions and education Megan Boler. The Students are Watching: schools and the moral contract Theodore R.Sizer & Nancy Faust Sizer.

This article asks how people come to interpret themselves and others as autonomous given their multiple dependencies. We draw on a cross-case comparison of ethnographic studies with two populations for whom autonomy is both central and problematic: elderly patients in post-acute care, and young adults with disabilities in an independent living program. Analyzing the institutional efforts to make their clients “as independent as possible,” we find that staff members at each organization formulate autonomy as a temporal project through an ongoing (...) calibration of open futures, ideal pasts, and situational competence. Constantly adjusting and fine-tuning where in time autonomy “really” is, workers arrange present dependence so that the contours of the future remain open for their clients. In other words, they make use of temporal markers to produce recognizable autonomous subjects whose dependencies are momentary. Theorizing this temporal project enables us to see more clearly how all of us engage in the constant business of “doing” autonomy, and to better understand the role of institutions in producing autonomous selves. (shrink)

Fifty years of Darwinism.--The personality of Charles Darwin.--The Darwin centenary at Oxford.--Charles Darwin and the University of Cambridge.--The value of colour in the struggle for life.--Mimicry in the butterflies of North America.--Letters from Charles Darwin to Roland Trimen.--Appendix A. Charles Darwin and the hypothesis of multiple origins.--Appendix B. Darwin and evolution by mutation.--Appendix C. Further proof that scientific work was necessary for Darwin.--Appendix D. De Vries's 'fluctuations' hereditary according to De Vries, non-transmissible according to Bateson and Punnett.