_Naturalism and Democracy_, first published in German in 2014, presents a long-awaited commentary on Spinoza’s _Political Treatise _. It gives a detailed analysis of Spinoza’s latest theory of State and Law, with special attention to his democratic approach.

This book features essays that investigate the nature of legal validity from the point of view of different traditions and disciplines. Validity is a fascinating and elusive characteristic of law that in itself deserves to be explored, but further investigation is made more acute and necessary by the production, nowadays, of soft law products of regulation, such as declarations, self-regulatory codes, and standardization norms. These types of rules may not exhibit the characteristics of formal law, and may lack full formal (...) validity but yet may have a very real impact on people's lives. The essays focus on the structural properties of hard and soft legal phenomena and the basis of their validity. Some propose to redefine validity: to allow for multiple concepts instead of one and/or to allow for a gradual concept of validity. Others seek to analyze the new situation by linking it to familiar historical debates and well-established theories of law. In addition, coverage looks at the functions of validity itself. The discussion considers both international law as well as domestic law arrangements. What does it mean to say that something is valid? Should we discard validity as the determining aspect of law? If so, what does this mean for our concept of law? Should we differentiate between kinds of validity? Or, can we say that rules can be "more" or "less" valid? After reading this book, practitioners, scholars and students will have a nuanced understanding of these questions and more. Chapter 6 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com. (shrink)

Naturalism and Democracy, first published in German in 2014, presents a long-awaited commentary on Spinoza’s Political Treatise (Tractatus politicus). It gives a detailed analysis of Spinoza’s latest theory of State and Law, with special attention to his democratic approach.

English summary: A commentary on Spinoza's final work, Tractatus Politicus has until recently remained a desideratum. In contrast to his metaphysics and his philosophy of religion, Spinoza's theories on politics, the state and law have received little attention in the German-speaking countries. It's only recently that Spinoza's political philosophy again become widely discussed in Germany. Having established the role of political philosophy and working always within the context of Spinoza's complete work, this volume comments firstly on Spinoza's theory on the (...) natural genesis of law and the state, including the foundations of political philosophy, the relationship between natural and national law and the theory of sovereignty and international relations. Continuing on this basis it moves on to his concept for the optimization of the system of political and legal institutions in all three forms of government. Finally, there is an analysis of the current relevance of Spinoza's thought and its impact on current debate. The work includes contributions by Tilman Altwicker, Wolfgang Bartuschat, Tobias Herbst, Gunnar Hindrichs, Rainer Keil, Stephan Kirste, Martin Leiner, Oliver W. Lembcke, Tilman Reitz and Manfred Walther. German description: Ein Kommentar zu Spinozas letztem Werk Tractatus politicus war bislang ein Desiderat. Spinozas Theorie der Politik, des Staates und des Rechts ist anders als seine Metaphysik und seine Religionsphilosophie im deutschsprachigen Bereich lange wenig beachtet worden. Erst in jungerer Zeit ist die Beschaftigung mit Spinozas politischer Philosophie auch in Deutschland wieder intensiver geworden. Nach einer Bestimmung des Ortes der Politischen Philosophie und stets im Kontext von Spinozas Gesamtwerk kommentiert der Band zunachst Spinozas Theorie der naturlichen Genese von Recht und Staat, so die Grundlagen der politischen Philosophie, das Verhaltnis von naturlichem und staatlichem Recht, die Theorie der Souveranitat und der internationalen Beziehungen. Auf dieser Grundlage folgt dann seine Konzeption einer Optimierung des Systems politisch-rechtlicher Institutionen fur alle drei Regierungsformen. Abschliessend werden die Aktualitat des Denkens Spinozas und sein Einfluss auf gegenwartige Debatten analysiert. Mit Beitragen von: Tilman Altwicker, Wolfgang Bartuschat, Tobias Herbst, G unnar Hindrichs, Rainer Keil, Stephan Kirste, Martin Leiner, Oliver W. Lembcke, Tilman Reitz, Manfred Walther. (shrink)

There is a bustling, fluorescent clamor that governs hospital hallways during the day and so fills the air that any sound wanting attention has to vie for it, each alarm louder and more cacophonous than the last. But at night, an altogether different temper settles over the hospital. A restrained, low-lit quiet descends, transforming those long corridors into a space that seems smaller and almost comforting. Almost any sound stands out at night. I was once trudging down one of those (...) subdued nighttime hallways after many busy hours on call, allowing the glimpse of sleeping patients in each passing room to give me hope for a nap that night, too. My head was down and my thoughts were elsewhere, but the .. (shrink)

Under the influence of a narrowly understood scientific legal positivism, jurisprudence has neglected interdisciplinary research for a long time. However, today there are strong practical and scholarly reasons for an interdisciplinary analysis of law triggered, e.g., by bioethics, life sciences, economics and ecology. And yet the very subject matter of law shimmering between normativity and descriptivity seems to resist all attempts to be taken in by common enterprises across disciplines: How then is the necessary interdisciplinary research in jurisprudence possible without (...) abandoning its core, legal dogmatics? This question was discussed at a special working group during the IVR-World Congress in Cracow. The papers have been polished and updated for publication. The volume falls into two parts: One is directed at the basic conceptual and institutional questions of interdisciplinary research in jurisprudence; the other one concentrates on one fruitful and highly important field of interdisciplinary research, constitutionalism. The volume brings together a truly international and in itself interdisciplinary group of experts in the field, from Finland to Brazil and from Spain to Greece. (shrink)

Angesichts der Globalisierung und der von ihr aufgeworfenen Probleme für das nationale und das internationale Recht gewinnt die Rechtsphilosophie immer stärker an Bedeutung. Zugleich verbinden sich rechtstheoretische Fragen wieder zunehmend mit philosophischen Überlegungen. Der vorliegende Band versammelt 20 Beiträge namhafter Rechtstheoretiker und Philosophen, die die eigenständige Begriffsbildung und die Entwicklung neuer Theorieansätze auf dem Gebiet der Rechtsphilosophie zum Ziel haben. Das Spektrum reicht dabei von grundbegrifflichen Klärungen bis hin zu konkreten Problemstellungen des globalisierten Rechts und bietet einen umfassenden Überblick über (...) die aktuelle deutsche und internationale Debatte. Mit Beiträgen u. a. von Robert Alexy, Klaus Günther, Gunther Teubner, Otfried Höffe und Jürgen Habermas. (shrink)

Modern societies often claim to be democracies in order to enjoy greater legitimacy. Still, to understand the concept of democracy and how to justify it, the definition of it as self-determined is not sufficient. A complex understanding has to take into account ideas of rule of law as well as human rights. Sometimes these three concepts compete with each other - particularly in societies with a pluralistic approach to what "the good life" should be, such as societies which are made (...) up of distinct cultural backgrounds. This book presents a concept of democracy that encompasses at the same time the ideas of rule of law, human rights and self-determination. It contains the main lectures of the XXVI World Congress of Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy, hosted by the Internationale Vereinigung fur Rechts- und Sozialphilosophie at the Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (Brazil) in July 2013. (shrink)

In the course of its history since the Middle Ages law has shifted from a dependent object of the cultural memory to a forming power. By the selection and stabilization of certain values and norms and the discrimination of others it influences the general understanding of the past no less than by making the criminal offender a memory in the prosecution or on the opposite by demanding the deletion of data which could infringe the privacy of a person. This influence (...) is not without danger for fundamental freedoms, as the French laws on the debate about its colonial past show. Accordingly, the impact of the law on the cultural memory is limited by fundamental rights such as the freedom of science and the rights of personality. (shrink)

We can distinguish three forms of personification: Sensualizing personification, in which a presumed spiritual entity is presented in a material form; animating personification, in which a material object is given a symbolic spiritual meaning and finally the moral personification, in which an empirical subject receives a moral subjective status. Legal personification resembles the moral personification in its normativity and in giving the subject a new artificial status. This personification is carried out in the form of law, however, namely in a (...) reflective normative order. Only in this personified legal status, is the struggle of the individual for law (Jhering) in itself a legal procedure and the person rid of its subjection to mere power. (shrink)

ObjectiveTo determine whether gait and accelerometric features can predict disorientation events in young and older adults.MethodsCognitively healthy younger and older participants navigated on a treadmill through a virtual representation of the city of Rostock featured within the Gait Real-Time Analysis Interactive Lab system. We conducted Bayesian Poisson regression to determine the association of navigation performance with domain-specific cognitive functions. We determined associations of gait and accelerometric features with disorientation events in real-time data using Bayesian generalized mixed effect models. The accuracy (...) of gait and accelerometric features to predict disorientation events was determined using cross-validated support vector machines and Hidden Markov models.ResultsBayesian analysis revealed strong evidence for the effect of gait and accelerometric features on disorientation. The evidence supported a relationship between executive functions but not visuospatial abilities and perspective taking with navigation performance. Despite these effects, the cross-validated percentage of correctly assigned instances of disorientation was only 72% in the SVM and 63% in the HMM analysis using gait and accelerometric features as predictors.ConclusionDisorientation is reflected in spatiotemporal gait features and the accelerometric signal as a potentially more easily accessible surrogate for gait features. At the same time, such measurements probably need to be enriched with other parameters to be sufficiently accurate for individual prediction of disorientation events. (shrink)

In print for the first time in over ten years, Act and Crime provides a unified account of the theory of action presupposed by both Anglo-American criminal law and the morality that underlies it. The book defends the view that human actions are always volitionally caused bodily movements and nothing else. The theory is used to illuminate three major problems in the drafting and the interpretation of criminal codes: 1) what the voluntary act requirement both does and should require; 2) (...) what complex descriptions of actions prohibited by criminal codes both do and should require ; and 3) when two actions are 'the same' for purposes of assessing whether multiple prosecutions and multiple punishments are warranted. The book both contributes to the development of a coherent theory of action in philosophy, and it provides both legislators and judges a grounding in three of the most basic elements of criminal liability. (shrink)

In this short, dense essay, Jean Cavaillès evaluates philosophical efforts to determine the origin - logical or ontological - of scientific thought, arguing that, rather than seeking to found science in original intentional acts, a priori meanings, or foundational logical relations, any adequate theory must involve a history of the concept. Cavaillès insists on a historical epistemology that is conceptual rather than phenomenological, and a logic that is dialectical rather than transcendental. His famous call (cited by Foucault) to abandon "a (...) philosophy of consciousness" for "a philosophy of the concept" was crucial in displacing the focus of philosophical enquiry from aprioristic foundations toward structural historical shifts in the conceptual fabric. This new translation of Cavaillès's final work, written in 1942 during his imprisonment for Resistance activities, presents an opportunity to reencounter an original and lucid thinker. Cavaillès's subtle adjudication between positivistic claims that science has no need of philosophy, and philosophers' obstinate disregard for actual scientific events, speaks to a dilemma that remains pertinent for us today. His affirmation of the authority of scientific thinking combined with his commitment to conceptual creation yields a radical defense of the freedom of thought and the possibility of the new. (shrink)

Tri filosofskikh "opravdanii︠a︡" (teodit︠s︡ei︠a︡, antropodit︠s︡ei︠a︡, kosmodit︠s︡ei︠a︡ Serebri︠a︡nogo veka) -- Russkai︠a︡ sofiologii︠a︡ i kabbala -- S. Bulgakov : nauka sofiologii︠a︡ (ili konet︠s︡ religii) -- Tretiĭ Zavet o. Sergii︠a︡ Bulgakova -- Tretʹezavetnai︠a︡ misterii︠a︡ ("malai︠a︡" trilogii︠a︡ Bulgakova).

v. 1. pt. 1. Babaji's glimpses of the Tamil 18 Siddhas. pt. 2. [non-Roman data].

In Alfonso de Cartagena's 'Memoriale virtutum' (1422) María Morrás and Jeremy Lawrance offer a new edition from the manuscripts of a compilation of Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics addressed by the major Castilian intellectual of the day, bishop Alfonso de Cartagena, to the heir to the throne of Portugal, crown prince Duarte. The work was a speculum principis, an education for the future king in the virtues suitable to a statesman; Cartagena's choice of Aristotle was thus a significant index of the advent (...) of new Renaissance ideas. This edition shows how the "memorial" throws light on the ideological transformation of society those ideas would bring, setting new ethical guidelines for the ruling class at the crossroads between medieval feudalism and Renaissance absolutism. (shrink)