This paper analyses the Verlagsanzeige of the humanist, mathematician, astronomer and publisher Johannes Regiomontanus. How is humanism expressed in this famous document from German early printing and what is its relationship to philosophy? The article shows that Regiomontanus advocated a special form of humanism that went beyond the standard humanism that he valued, with ‘truth’ as its most important aspect. From the epistemological perspective of the history of philosophy in Regiomontanus’s publishing programme, the ‘truth’ of mathematics is seen, analogous (...) to some predecessors, as a paradigm of programmatic testimony. The integration of philosophy is evident in this, as in another specified way as well. (shrink)

In Mengzi 6A4, Gaozi states that “yì 義 (propriety, rightness) is external, not internal.” In 6A5, Meng Jizi says of yì that “...it is on the external, not from the internal.” Their defenses are met with Mengzi’s resistance. What does he perceive and resist in these statements? Focusing on several key passages, I compare six promising interpretations. 6A4 and a relevant part of 2A2 can be rendered comparably sensible under each of the six. However, what Gaozi says in 6A1 clearly (...) is evidence to Mengzi that, of the six views, Gaozi holds three although he does not convey them in his statement. As for Meng Jiz’s defense of his statement, Meng Jizi cites a special occasion where one is required to act one way even though one would feel a different way. Mengzi’s response has been traditionally interpreted as boiling down to a dissenting opinion about empirical psychology, that the agent on that special occasion would in fact feel the same way as they ought to act. But on a more charitable reading, the point Mengzi makes is conceptual: Though the satisfaction of yì may not require that the feeling and the act align perfectly in this case, cases where the alignment obtains are conceptually prior. This not only refutes Meng Jizi’s statement but also enables a more elegant explanation of why the Mengzi rightly has no record of Mengzi affirming that yì is internal. I conclude that 6A5 itself uniquely favors one interpretation, as far as Meng Jizi’s position is concerned: How one feels is irrelevant to whether one satisfies yì. (shrink)

Australia is second only to Israel in being the world’s most culturally diverse nation, based largely on high levels of immigration in the second part of the 20th century. From the 1970s onwards, Australia formally recognized the massive social changes brought about by postwar immigration, and provided legislation to incorporate cultural diversity into everyday lives. One such ‘legislative’ enactment saw the establishment of multicultural broadcasting in Australia, as arguably a world-first, both in its comprehensiveness and diversity. Today, Australia has a (...) public sector corporation, the Special Broadcasting Service, administering five radio services in 68 languages. Also, the Community Radio sector produces multicultural programming in 100 languages through a number of its 330 broadcast and 207 narrowcast stations. This article examines the relationship between radio and its communities. It argues that despite the ‘profile’ of SBS television, radio is much closer to its constituent communities, and therefore plays a greater role in enabling those communities to speak their own histories, beyond the confines of a consensual Anglophile paradigm. (shrink)

Ms. X is a person with cerebral palsy and schizophrenia. She has intractable bedsores that are a result of her immobility and to poor wound care related to her delusional thinking. Despite intensive community support, the wounds have worsened to the point that she has needed multiple hospitalizations to prevent systemic sepsis, a life‐threatening condition. She is capable of placement decisions and wishes for independence at home but is incapable of making wound care decisions and does not appreciate that immediately (...) returning home from the hospital, instead of going into a special care facility, would likely result in sepsis. The resulting dilemma about discharge planning highlights the complexity involved in weighing concerns around mental illness and capacity for treatment and placement of care. The extent of the care that is required and available in a community or health care system and the slow but relatively certain progression of the symptoms also make the decision challenging. Two commentaries take very different approaches in exploring the question whether Ms. X should be supported to go home or to a special care facility. (shrink)

Theoria, Volume 88, Issue 4, Page 782-798, August 2022.

In this article, I take up two arguments in favor of the discursive model of legal argumentation: the claim to correctness argument and the dual nature thesis. The argument of correctness implies the dual nature thesis, and the dual nature thesis implies a nonpositivistic concept of law. The nonpositivistic concept of law comprises five ideas. One of them is the special case thesis. The special case thesis says that positivistic elements, that is, statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, are (...) necessary for law in order to achieve legal certainty. Without this, law would not be as perfect as it could possibly be. But it says, at the same time, that this alone would not be enough to fulfill the claim to correctness. The claim to correctness refers not only to the real dimension of law, defined by statutes, precedents, and prevailing doctrines, but also to its ideal dimension, defined, first and foremost, by justice. The special case thesis is my oldest thesis. It has remained an essential element of my system over the years. Its connection with four other theses—the Radbruch formula, the human rights thesis, the idea of deliberative democracy, and principles theory—does not change this at all. On the contrary, this connection has lent greater strength to the special case thesis. (shrink)

Recent controversial cases of killings by police have generated competing Black Lives Matter and Blue Lives Matter movements. Blue Lives Matter proponents claim that the focus on and protests in light of police killings of unarmed black persons is unwarranted. Part of this dispute turns on the moral evaluation of the killing of citizens by law enforcement. To address the dispute, I develop an account of the special moral obligations of law enforcement and show how it can be applied. (...) I argue that members of law enforcement have special moral obligations against killing citizens. The account generates moral guidance for law enforcement in a number of other ways. It implies, finally, that the Blue Lives Matter proponents fundamentally misunderstand the ethics of law enforcement. (shrink)

This paper explores whether it is possible to reformulate or re-interpret Lewis’s theory of fundamental laws of nature—his “best system analysis”—in such a way that it becomes a useful theory for special science laws. One major step in this enterprise is to make plausible how law candidates within best system competitions can tolerate exceptions—this is crucial because we expect special science laws to be so called “ceteris paribus laws ”. I attempt to show how (...) this is possible and also how we can thereby make the first step towards a solution for the infamous difficulties surrounding the troublesome ceteris paribus clause. The paper outlines the general ideas of the theory but also points out some of its difficulties and background assumptions. (shrink)

Adam Elga has presented an anti-thermodynamic process as a counterexample to Lewis’s default semantics for counterfactuals. The outstanding reaction of Jonathan Schaffer and Boris Kment is revisionary. It sacrifices Lewis’s aim of defining causation in terms of counterfactual dependence. Lewis himself suggested an alternative: «counter-entropic funnybusiness» should make for dissimilarity. But how is this alternative to be spelled out? I discuss a recent proposal: include special science laws, among them the laws of thermodynamics. Although the proposal fails, (...) it serves to uncover the limits of Elga’s example. (shrink)

The relationship between law and morality is a topic which receives special importance and attention, especially in "liberal democracies" in which the law is supposed to regulate highly pluralized and fragmented societies. Under conditions of plurality of values, many social forces and legal theories require a certain kind of neutrality from the legal system, a means of compatibility of the many "world views" and "moral systems" that are present within the same social space. Such a conciliating commitment sounds particularly (...) relevant in times of the doctrinal ubiquity of ideas such as "peace based on human rights". This was the title of the 28th World Congress of the IVR in Lisbon, with the special workshop "Law and Morals" on which this book is based. It is divided into four parts: "Law and Practical Reason", "Conceptual Approaches on Law and Morals", "Legal versus Moral Normativity", and "Morals and Legal Positivism". (shrink)

This article considers what the implications of decertification would be for single-sex services such as domestic and sexual violence support. Some reform options attached to decertification could (re)allocate authority away from the state to organisations or individuals to determine gender criteria. What would the consequences of such re-allocation be in determining eligibility to receive or access services or excluding people on the basis of a characteristic protected under equality law? Engaging with this in the context of domestic and sexual violence (...) support service provision raises a number of questions. Firstly, does the existence of gender-based violence and/or of the effects it produces require a stable category in order to address them? What benefits may emerge from providing single-sex spaces that could not be replicated in other settings? And finally, what criteria of exclusion and inclusion are currently used to determine access to spaces beyond legal gender status? (shrink)

The Euthyphro problem and the natural law : an investigation of some aspects of the medieval debate on natural law -- Aristotle : natural law and man in the "metaxy" -- St. Thomas Aquinas : the "lex naturalis" -- Thomas Hobbes : The state of nature and natural rights -- John Locke : natural law, natural rights and God -- Concluding remarks and a heavenly dialogue.

The question of whether biology contains laws has important implications about the nature of science. Some philosophers believe that the legitimacy of the special sciences depends on whether they contain laws. In this dissertation, I defend the thesis that biology contains laws. In Chapter I, I discuss the importance of this problem and set the stage for my inquiry. In Chapter V, I summarize the results of Chapters II, III, and IV and I offer reasons why (...) the position I advance should be preferred over the alternatives. ;In Chapter II, I argue that the epistemic functions of a priori biological laws in biology are the same as those of empirical laws in physics. I establish this claim by showing that zero force laws and singleton force laws in these sciences function in the same way. I conclude that the requirement that laws must be empirical is idle in connection with how laws operate in science. ;In Chapter III, I argue that even if there are ceteris paribus sentences, it is unlikely that there are ceteris paribus laws. If there are genuine ceteris paribus laws, then 'ceteris paribus' should be a proper part of a law statement in which it occurs. I argue that if we interpret 'ceteris paribus' in this way, the containing sentence cannot be a law because it does not satisfy a minimal condition for laws---i.e., "ceteris paribus A 's are B's" and "ceteris paribus A's are not B's" should not both be true. ;In Chapter IV, I argue that the reasons offered for the non-existence of empirical biological laws don't establish the intended conclusion. I, then, argue that the kinds of law we should expect to find in biology are biophysical laws. I defend this claim by providing a priori and a posteriori arguments. The a priori argument states that the complexity of a system is no reason to think that there are no laws about that system. The a posteriori argument states that current research in evolutionary ecology indicates the existence of biophysical laws. (shrink)

After decades of deregulation and innovation, contemporary financial markets remain firmly anchored in law and legal institutions. The idea that private financial actors simply want to escape government oversight and regulation is simplistic as private interests find the coercive powers of the state too useful to forgo. Instead, such actors engage law selectively to create a more certain environment for themselves and their profit-seeking activities. Contract law adds certainty to financial transactions; law shapes how financial actors use information and exploit (...) information technology; law constitutes financial values; and law allows financial institutions to be turned into assets. Law’s application is shaped by changing conceptions of risk, as well as by new business models for financial institutions. (shrink)

The traditional view of science holds that science is essentially nomothetic—that is, the defining characteristic of science is that it seeks to discover and formulate laws for the phenomena in its domain, and that laws are required for explanation and prediction. This paper advances the thesis that there are no laws in the special sciences, sciences other than fundamental physics, and that this does not impugn their status as sciences. Toward this end, two arguments are presented. (...) The first begins with Donald Davidson’s argument against psychophysical laws and develops a more perspicacious general argument against special science laws. The second is a generalized and more explicitly motivated argument based on J. J. C. Smart’s claim that biology, unlike physics, has no laws. (shrink)

There is the general philosophical question concerning the relationship between physics, which is often taken to be our fundamental and all-encompassing science, on one hand and the special sciences, such as biology and psychology, each of which deals with phenomena in some specially restricted domain, on the other. This paper deals with a narrower question: Are there laws in the special sciences, laws like those we find, or expect to find, in basic physics? Three arguments that (...) are intended to show that there are no such laws are presented and examined. The paper ends with brief remarks concerning the implications of these arguments for explanation and causation in the special sciences. (shrink)

IntroductionNowadays, biotechnology has a significant influence on different aspects of human life. The applications of biotechnology are so broad, and the advantages so compelling, that virtually every industry is using this technology. Developments are under way in areas as diverse as pharmaceuticals, diagnostics, textiles, aquaculture, forestry, chemicals, household products, environmental cleanup, food processing, and forensics, to name a few. Biotechnology is enabling these industries to make new or better products, often with greater speed, efficiency, and flexibility. Biotechnology is any technological (...) application that uses biological systems, living organisms, or derivatives thereof to make or modify products or processes for specific use. It applies the knowledge of biology to enhance and improve the environment, health, and food supply. Using biotechnology, scientists work to develop environment-friendly alternatives to fossil fuels and plastics; new medicines, vaccines, and. (shrink)

What are ceteris paribus laws? Which disciplines appeal to cp laws and which semantics, metaphysical underpinning, and epistemological dimensions do cp law statements have? Firstly, we give a short overview of the recent discussion on cp laws, which addresses these questions. Secondly, we suggest that given the rich and diverse literature on cp laws a broad conception of cp laws should be endorsed which takes into account the different ways in which laws can be (...) non-universal . Finally, we provide an overview of the special issue on that basis and describe the individual contributions to the special issue according to the issues they address: the range of applications of cp laws as well as the semantics, metaphysics, and epistemology pertaining to cp law statements. (shrink)

What, exactly, is the relationship between ethics and law in the contemporary discourse on military ethics? Gregory Reichberg (PhD, Emory University, 1990) is Senior Researcher at the International...

Laws of nature seem to take two forms. Fundamental physics discovers laws that hold without exception, ‘strict laws’, as they are sometimes called; even if some laws of fundamental physics are irreducibly probabilistic, the probabilistic relation is thought not to waver. In the nonfundamental, or special, sciences, matters differ. Laws of such sciences as psychology and economics hold only ceteris paribus – that is, when other things are equal. Sometimes events accord with these ceteris (...) paribus laws (c.p. laws, hereafter), but sometimes the laws are not manifest, as if they have somehow been placed in abeyance: the regular relation indicative of natural law can fail in circumstances where an analogous outcome would effectively refute the assertion of strict law. Many authors have questioned the supposed distinction between strict laws and c.p. laws. The brief against it comprises various considerations: from the complaint that c.p. clauses are void of meaning to the claim that, although understood well enough, they should appear in all law-statements. These two concerns, among others, are addressed in due course, but first, I venture a positive proposal. I contend that there is an important contrast between strict laws and c.p. laws, one that rests on an independent distinction between combinatorial and noncombinatorial nomic principles.2 Instantiations of certain properties, e.g., mass and charge, nomically produce individual forces, or more generally, causal influences,3 in accordance with noncombinatorial.. (shrink)

I am grateful to Daniel Little for his insightful reply to my recent article in Social Epistemology about what appears to be a flaw in Jon Elster’s conception of mechanisms. I agree with much of what Little says, but want to amplify a different underlying problem with Elster’s conception than Little suggests in his reply. This underlying problem connects nicely with a passage in Little’s reply, which he thinks unconnected with the point on which I focus.

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the special workshop "Truth and Objectivity in Law and Morals," held at the 26th World Congress of the IVR. The papers deal with diverse but correlated issues such as the search for truth in and through legal argumentation; the intelligible character of rules inside theories of interpretation which guarantee the coherence and the integrity of law; the role of hermeneutic analysis in the construction of the objectivity of law; the procedural (...) and contextual aspects of objectivity in legal reasoning; the role of objectivity in the distinction between the context of justification and the context of discovery; the problem about truth of normative propositions and legal statements; the incompatibility of non factualism with the traditional account of validity and legality; as well as the possibility of objectivity in morals. (shrink)

We critically revisit the definition of thermal equilibrium, in its operational formulation, provided by standard thermodynamics. We show that it refers to experimental conditions which break the covariance of the theory at a fundamental level and that, therefore, it cannot be applied to the case of moving bodies. We propose an extension of this definition which is manifestly covariant and can be applied to the study of isolated systems in special relativity. The zeroth law of thermodynamics is, then, proven (...) to establish an equivalence relation among bodies which have not only the same temperature, but also the same center of mass four-velocity. (shrink)

Deontology holds that the rules or principles that govern the permissibility of actions cannot be derived simply from the goal of promoting good consequences. The definition has to be given negatively because there is still much disagreement about what positively grounds these rules or principles. The articles in this special issue—collected mostly from papers presented at a conference sponsored by the Institute for Law and Philosophy at Rutgers UniversityOne paper in this issue, from Gerhard Øverland, was not presented at (...) the conference with the rest. He was scheduled to present his paper, but could not attend the conference because he was diagnosed with cancer. He died of cancer shortly after submitting his article to this issue. This is a great loss to his friends and collaborators, and to the philosophical community as a whole.—cover a fairly representative range of these different views. The truth about deontology—including whether it is true at all—is important to criminal law in .. (shrink)

The ethics of policing currently neglects to provide a framework for analysing the morality of deliberate inactions to prevent harm, even though these are often adopted tactically by police as a means of preventing greater harms. In this paper we argue (a) that police have special moral obligations to prevent harm, grounded both in a contractarian account of police legitimacy and in the interpersonal morality of associations and (b) that police are morally culpable for failures to fulfil these (...) class='Hi'>special obligations when these are neither proportionate nor necessary to the prevention of greater crime-related harms. Our claims have implications both for the morality of policing and for its regulation and governance under human rights legislation, which we argue should be reformed so as to recognise police culpability not only for inflictions of harm, but also for failures to prevent it. (shrink)

This volume presents an extended version of the contributions presented at the workshop "Kant's Concept of Law" held at the 26th World Congress of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy (IVR) in 2013. It handles issues of applied legal philosophy in Kant's Doctrine of Right such as ownership, the alleged right of necessity, the right of resistance and the right of revolution. With each of these applied issues, the focus lies, on the one hand, on the (...) relationship between the principles a priori of law and of the duties of rights, as well as their normative requirements - for instance, the duty of independence from the coercion by others - and, on the other hand, empirical situations and their pressing demands. Thus, this volume illustrates how Kant concretely conceives of the doctrine of "first metaphysical of the doctrine of right" as supplying "the immutable principles for any giving of positive law". Each essay of this volume not only undertakes a careful and original interpretation of Kant's theses, but also offers a critical assessment. (shrink)

In the present commentary on Jaegwon Kim's Laws, Causation, and Explanation in the Special Sciences, I first give a short summary of the global problem. In a second step, I go on to sum up and comment on the three arguments which Kim gives to the disadvantage of 'strict' special-science laws. In so doing, I shall focus on the question whether ceteris paribus laws can still apply in special sciences.

The Conference on Dispositions and Laws of Nature was held at the University of Alabama at Birmingham in February 2003, and by all accounts was a great success. Upon seeing the program for the conference, John Symons of Synthese thought the papers would make an excellent special issue, and so here we are. Roughly speaking, dispositions are tendencies or powers—a fragile glass’s disposition to break when struck. Laws of nature, like Newton’s laws of motion, are commonly (...) thought to be true generalizations that supports counterfactuals, play an important role in scientific explanation, and can be inductively confirmed by their instances. Dispositions and laws are components of different, perhaps competing, metaphysical views regarding the source of power and activity in the universe. Supposing that dispositions and laws of nature exist, in some sense, I see two basic options as to how they are related: 1. Laws give otherwise inert particulars their dispositions. 2. Particulars have certain dispositions, and general truths about these dispositions constitute the laws of nature. (shrink)

This article interrogates whether and how the concept of ‘patriarchy’ is used by UN human rights treaty monitoring bodies (treaty bodies) and special procedures to interpret state obligations to respect and ensure women’s human rights. There are two key points that arise out of this study: first, that several treaty bodies and special procedures purposely and consistently use the concept of ‘patriarchy’ when discussing women’s human rights, and second, that although not all treaty bodies and special procedures (...) have referred to the terms ‘patriarchy’ or ‘patriarchal’, an examination of those that have reveals a marked difference in how the terms are used by treaty bodies when compared with special procedures. While treaty bodies render the meaning of ‘patriarchy’ as being synonymous with certain harmful practices, such as female-genital mutilation (FGM), special procedures utilise ‘patriarchy’ as a system of power, permeating every facet of society. In this article I will argue that the current state of dissonance between the understandings of ‘patriarchy’ by treaty bodies and special procedures creates an unnecessary ambiguity that does nothing to advance gender equality. Furthermore, utilising a nuanced understanding of patriarchy, as articulated by intersectional and anti-essentialist feminist scholars, would potentially equip treaty bodies and special procedures for more meaningful interpretation of rights themselves, and greater protection of women’s human rights. (shrink)

This paper provides a taxonomy of the different kinds of theory that may be offered of an area of law. We distinguish two basic types of philosophical accounts in special jurisprudence: nonnormative accounts and normative accounts. Section II explains the two central subspecies of nonnormative accounts of areas of law: (i) conceptual and ontological theories and (ii) reason-tracking causal theories. Section III explores normative theories of areas of law. Normative accounts subdivide into detached and committed normative accounts. Detached or (...) committed normative accounts can be subdivided further into the following cross-cutting categories: (i) pro tanto or all-things-considered, (ii) hyper-reformist or practice-dependent, (iii) taxonomical or substantive. Section IV shows that our taxonomy does not presume a prior commitment to any particular school in general jurisprudence. This paper clarifies methodological confusion that exists in theorizing about areas of law, and contributes to the subfield of thinking generally about special jurisprudence. (shrink)