A rule of recognition for a legal order L seems utterly circular if it refers to behaviour of “officials.” For it takes a rule of recognition to identify who, for L, counts as an official and who does not. I will argue that a Kelsenian account of legal authority can solve the aporia, provided that we accept a, perhaps unorthodox, re‐interpretation of Kelsen's norm theory and his idea of the Grundnorm. I submit that we should learn to see it as (...) the vanishing point rather than the final basis of validity in a legal order. To prepare the ground for this proposal, I will briefly explore the claim to authority that is characteristic of politics. Then I sketch a multi‐layered canonical form of the legal norm, including their “empowering” character (Paulson) in terms of performative operators. I show how it leads to a “perspectival” account of the basic norm. In conclusion, I briefly point to the example of sovereignty and acquis communautair in international law to illustrate this view. (shrink)

Responsibility disappears into the background of private law as it deals with imputation of liability. Fitness to be held liable is determined by normative viewpoints different from moral ones, in particular by convictions on how society ought to be organized so as to avoid or end conflict between private citizens. Modes of discursive control are geared to making authoritative decisions in view of the same end, and corporate agency is created, restricted or enlarged to undercut or to impose individual liability.

In the Social Contract Rousseau gives what could be called a philosophical rule of recognition for law in Modernity: a law is law if and only if 'the whole people rules over the whole people'. Thus, he defines self-legislation as, at bottom, collective intentional action. I will first map out the speech act structure [LEX] underlying self-legislation on this account. In particular, I argue for a first person plural counterpart of the reflexive structure inherent to intentions generally: the notion of (...) a collective self. Then I take issue with Bratman's analysis of shared intentional activity in terms of mutuality, submitting that it misses out on the specifically political presupposition involved in 'doing something together'. I will show why 'mutuality' requires representation of the unity of a polity, and how this representation can take form without either external authority or mutual responsiveness. (shrink)

This volume examines the problems of legal and linguistic diversity in the EU legal system. In a union of 27 member states, with 23 different languages, how can the coherence of EU law be guaranteed? Is there a common understanding between lawyers from different national backgrounds as to the meaning and domestic application of EU law? The volume addresses these central questions from a range of theoretical and practical perspectives.

The core of Kelsen's strong views onauthority emerging from his concept of law is this:Authority of law, authority in law andauthority about law are one and the same thing.The conceptual problems suggested by these threedifferent prepositions must and can be solved in onefell swoop. Kelsen's core view will first be probed bygiving an account of what is a promising approachoffered in a fairly early text, Das Problem derSouveränität, namely, what it means to`set' or `posit' the law. Inevitably, this leadsto an (...) interpretation of the Grundnorm, one thatintends to accommodate as many Kelsenian emphases aspossible. The Grundnorm will be presented as ashield against hypostatising authority. From there,some characteristics will be inferred of the type ofauthority that arises from Kelsen's account of legalknowledge, which will be called, somewhat polemically,authority without an author. (shrink)

This issue is a special investigation into phenomenology of law through the thought of Bernard Waldenfels. Waldenfels, who is presently emeritus professor of philosophy at Ruhr Universität, Bochum, has made a name for himself in his own research and publications on the nexus surrounding the other as non-phenomenon, language as response, and the fissures of corporeality.Along side his expansive introduction and own separate article, guest editor Bert van Roermund has collected together six outstanding contributions to this ‘Waldenfeldian’ phenomenology (...) of law.Waldenfels himself kicks of this number with an original article outlining his conception of the legal order within a phenomenology of the other. Arguing that the legal order, like all orders, must have its own particular ‘outside’ or ‘unsaid,’ he investigates the critical perspectives that thus emerge.Then, David Janssens takes up Waldenfels’ treatment of Plato, which Janssens approaches through a Socratic investigation into the aporias at the foundation of the Platonic legal order. Waldenfels’ Plato seems rather Socratic in his confrontation of the reader with alterity.Next, William Conklin offers an in-depth investigation into the question as to how can human rights be considered universal by the very tribunals that also grant nations the right to define those who may legally be considered persons? Waldenfels’s notion of territorial structure offers its apparatus to Conklin’s substantial critique.Petra Gehring goes into the phenomenological theory of law, looking the ability of the law as an order to respond to claims of the alien. Claiming that law in fact is unable to respond, Gehring argues that phenomenology should legal phenomena critically as a problem of order within the double nature of what Waldenfels calls Anspruch and Antwort.Hans Lindahl analyzes the spatio-temporal borders of the European Union to lay bare the genesis of the Community’s legal order. Lindahl reveals this genesis to embody Waldenfels’ notion of the “chiasm of strangeness,” wherein the foundation of a Heimwelt simultaneously generates a Fremdwelt, and thus questions the very ability of Europe to be its own place.Finally, guest-editor Bert van Roermund supplements his introduction with yet another original contribution arguing that modern legislation is self-legislation. Attempting to identify the different voices comprising this self in an analytical scheme he terms [LEX], van Roermund borrows from Waldenfel’s notion of response and alterity in his analysis of how this structure responds to the classical notion of justice for every subject. (shrink)

Sovereignty and representation are the two concepts that legal theory is quick to regard as redundant in any account of legal authority. Sovereignty is alleged to be at odds with both the facts and the values of political pluralism; representation is, at most, a provisional substitute for participation in supra- and infra-national legal development. Antonio Negri, however, analyses sovereignty and representation as the two, closely linked, conceptual devices by which a legal order neutralizes constitutive political power. He argues that constitutionalism (...) and institutionalism are but the contemporary guises of these traditional notions and advocates openness for the multifarious initiatives of 'the multitude' to create new societal structures. This article argues that Negri is right in his critique of, in particular, institutionalism, but that he is wrong in thinking that Lefort's position can be reduced to its simple version. In the background of Lefort's theory we should see the political analogon of Merleau-Ponty's celebrated distinction between parole parlante and parole parlée. Negri himself appears unable to avoid the appeal to questionable referents of sovereignty and representation. (shrink)

This paper reflects on the idea of ‘visualization’ of legal rules as part of an account of rule following in action. Presenting an alternative to Van Schooten’s (Jurisprudence and communication. Deborah Charles, Liverpool, 2012) account of interpretation, I first distinguish between two modes of interpretation: rehearsing and discursive. I argue that the former is the more basic one, relating to our respecting sources, rather than noticing signs, in action. In other (Wittgensteinian) words, we have to understand how we take guidance (...) from rules. This account can profit from an analysis of what ‘seeing’ amounts to. Taking my cue from Merleau-Ponty, I point to the intertwinement between agent and world in seeing, in rule-following, and eventually in legal rule-following. The proof of the pudding is an alternative account of the time-honoured paradigm of legal interpretation: Hart’s ‘no vehicles in the park’. I show how this example is predicated on detecting ‘depth-clues’ in a rule, which allow an agent to correlate his vantage point to a vanishing point of a rule. The example illustrates a key-feature of rule following: reflexivity. I cannot follow a rule unless I project myself into its picture. (shrink)

Making a first sketch of philosophical issues arising from European Community law I want to present a series of more or less obvious, and more or less interrelated dilemmas, or even 'double binds'. Deepening the community becomes incompatible with widening membership. National states seem both necessary for and obstructive in articulating transnational problems. The more democracy is needed as a warrant for the public exercise of political power in Europe, the more the very concept of democracy on a European scale (...) evades understanding. European unity presupposes a unifying rule of law, while member states have radically different conceptions of this principle. Even the very core of European integration, the common market, is subject to two conflicting and, indeed, incompatible doctrines of competition. In explaining the nature of each dilemma I will try to take my cue from the Maastricht Treaty wherever this seems suitable. Then I will elaborate on the jurisprudential problems involved in it. Finally, each section will be closed by an attempt to state the nature of these problems in philosophical terms. (shrink)

In this paper Section 1 distinguishes between two modes of interpreting legal rules: rehearsal and discourse, arguing that the former takes priority over the latter in law, as in many other contexts. Section 2 offers two arguments that following a legal rule in the rehearsing mode presents a riddle. The first argument develops from law, and submits that legal rules do not tell us anything, because they are tautological. The second one develops from philosophy (Wittgenstein's later works), confronting us with (...) the paradox that incompatible courses of action may be derived from any rule. My solution presents a theory of rules as icons (Section 3). I use “icon” rather than “picture,” partly to avoid confusion with what is known among philosophers as “the picture theory of meaning.” Interpretation in the rehearsing mode hinges on imagination: imagining oneself in the space of reasons for action rather than reasoning oneself. In this act of imagination, we project ourselves into the rule in ways that are similar to the way we grasp the sense of paintings, music, stories, or poems. Finally (Section 4) I will defend the position that my view solves the puzzles in the second section, by arguing (a) that it is a better account of what Wittgenstein wrote than two competing theories (intuitionism and conventionalism), and (b) that it provides a more satisfactory account of how lawyers deal with legal rules in actual practice. (shrink)

The French Code civil , including the tradition of legal practice and scholarship it stands for, is the child of two parents: Enlightenment and Restoration. They came together in the person of Jean Etienne Marie Portalis (1746-1807), who was the main drafter of the code under Napoleon. I want to investigate which line of philosophical argument he followed in uniting the two and critically assess the value of this argumentation. In section 1 I briefly sketch the codification of civil law (...) in the (post-)revolutionary setting of the time, as well as Portalis’ philosophical background. Section 2 turns to the principled and wide-ranging discourse he delivered at the occasion of the formal presentation of the draft civil code to the legislature. This discourse, in turn, found its deeper roots in an extensive treatise that he wrote prior to the former, on the use and abuse of reason in times of Enlightenment (Section 3). I will focus, in particular, on the twin concepts of knowledge (section 4) and nature (section 5) in this treatise. From this vantage point, section 6 analyzes the eclectic way in which Portalis uses his philosophical godfathers Montesquieu and Rousseau, while section 7 shows why his preoccupation with the protection of established property rights can explain such eclecticism. Section 8 takes stock and submits that at least one of Portalis’ arguments presents a real challenge to Enlightenment philosophy up until the present day. (shrink)

Legislation in Modernity is self-legislation: legislation by a collective self. I argue that it can be formally characterised as a first-person plural intention, featuring an index ‘we’ at four different positions: the originator of the speech act expressing the intention, the subject of the intention expressed, the agent of the action intended, and the beneficiaries of the action to be performed. I carve out these four positions or ‘voices’ of the first person inlegislation, summarising them in an analytical scheme [LEX].But (...) self-legislation presupposes self-inclusion. Thus, it constitutes a boundary between the plural self and its alien. Taking my cue from Waldenfels’ explorations of responsiveness to ‘the alien,’ I ask how and why [LEX] responds to the classical appeal of justice: ‘to give everyonehis or her due.’ What does it mean to say that a self-enclosed ‘we’ is the agent of this giving? I will argue that the boundary constituted by this enclosure is possible only if it is imagined to be traversable.Throughout the argument, my main concern is with the question in what sense and to what extent a legal order requires unity. (shrink)

Niemand dacht oorspronkelijker, speelser en scherper dan Ludwig Wittgenstein, en hij wist het. Van de kristallijnen helderheid in de 'Tractatus' tot de alledaagse onoverzichtelijkheid van de 'Filosofische onderzoekingen' blijft zijn denken één lange worsteling tegen de betovering van ons intellect door de schier eindeloze variatie van vermommingen waarin taal de gedachte aan het oog onttrekt.0Wittgenstein wist dat hij een bijzonder talent had, en zijn visie op zichzelf is zeker zo boeiend als zijn kijk op de wereld. In zijn brieven en (...) dagboeken treedt een geniale, lastige, komische en ontroerende man naar voren die in leven en in sterven een onuitwisbare indruk maakte op de mensen die hem kenden.0Bert Keizer biedt een heldere en toegankelijke introductie in leven en werk van Wittgenstein. Hij bespreekt diens brieven, dagboeken en belangrijkste werken: de 'Tractatus', de 'Filosofische onderzoekingen' en 'Over zekerheid'. Dat doet hij gedreven en enthousiast, zonder belerend te worden.0. (shrink)

This book proves to be an excellent guide through the labyrinth of law. Its crucial point is legal order viewed from the perspective of a situated "We". Jurisprudence appears as an implicit sort of thinking, embedded in moral, political, epistemological, and linguistic contexts. Numerous example cases lead us from everyday issues to the abysses of violence. Anyone who practices or studies law will highly profit from reading this book. One sees how law functions by being more than mere law. Bernhard (...) Waldenfels, Ruhr-University Bochum, Germany Legal Thought and Philosophy clarifies background questions in legal research projects, such as the relationship between law and justice, law and politics, law and knowledge, facts and norms, normativity and validity, constituent and constitutional power, and rule and context. It provides advanced students in law and philosophy with an account of legal thinking that combines analytical and phenomenological insights. From a conception of justice as principled political self-restraint, the book explains why there are moral reasons to separate law from morality conceptually and in what sense a legal order is positive--that is, set by authority and bound up with history. The book explores the conditions under which law may become an object of knowledge and theorising, before finally discussing how these features come together in law as rule-following by citizens, officials, judges, and legislators alike. Addressing advanced students in law and philosophy, this key book: bridges separate traditions in legal philosophy (in particular analytical philosophy and phenomenology), develops a view of law as an institution of authority from a conception of justice in the socio-political relationship between we and the others, presents a systematic account of normativity and validity, explains in what sense law is doing things with rules. (shrink)

The philosophical essays collected here are predicated on the conviction that we live in a time when all-encompassing philosophical systems can no longer be seriously entertained as a true reflection of extant reality. Instead, an indefinite number of perspectives on - or discursive appropriations of - what is thought of as 'reality' are possible. Sometimes they diverge and sometimes they intersect in surprising ways, as these essays show. While the belief in an all-inclusive philosophical system is rejected, the author shows (...) that every perspective displays a coherence and illuminating power of its own.<BR> The collection is divided into two parts. The first considers philosophy, the individual and society, covering themes including the deleterious effects of capitalism on natural ecosystems, the modern conception of 'immortality' in Nietzsche's thought, Lacan's provocative interpretation of capitalist discourse, the current status of the humanities in universities, individual autonomy, the meaning of 'identification', global 'terrorism', and Plato's philosophical self-subversion. The second part gathers together perspectives on the arts and society, with the author arguing that reflections on cinema, architecture and music never isolate these arts from social concerns, but demonstrate their interconnectedness. (shrink)

The essays brought together in this volume are written from the dual perspectives of philosophy and psychoanalytic theory.

This collection of philosophical essays addresses important issues in the arts, encompassing painting, sculpture, photography, film and architecture.

Unter welchen Bedingungen kann es als ethisch vertretbar gelten, Menschen in biomedizinischen Experimenten als Probanden einzusetzen? Bert Heinrichs unternimmt es, die Ethik der Forschung am Menschen grundlegend und systematisch zu erschließen. Seine ethische Rahmentheorie wird im Hinblick auf drei kontrovers diskutierte Problemkomplexe ausgewertet, nämlich die Forschung mit Minderjährigen, randomisierte klinische Studien und Forschung in Entwicklungsländern. Sie soll helfen, wesentliche Orientierung bei der konkreten Problemlösung zu geben.

In spite of the remarkable progress made in the burgeoning field of social neuroscience, the neural mechanisms that underlie social encounters are only beginning to be studied and could —paradoxically— be seen as representing the ‘dark matter’ of social neuroscience. Recent conceptual and empirical developments consistently indicate the need for investigations, which allow the study of real-time social encounters in a truly interactive manner. This suggestion is based on the premise that social cognition is fundamentally different when we are in (...) interaction with others rather than merely observing them. In this article, we outline the theoretical conception of a second-person approach to other minds and review evidence from neuroimaging, psychophysiological studies and related fields to argue for the development of a second-person neuroscience, which will help neuroscience to really go social; this may also be relevant for our understanding of psychiatric disorders construed as disorders of social cognition. (shrink)

This volume compares the western ideas of knowledge with the African. It aims at creating a mirror through which the western knowledge culture can look at itself through an unusual and interesting angle. The culture of Sub-Saharan Africa is the substance from which we, in this book, have tried to construe an epistemological mirror.

Drawing on his extensive experience as both a medical practitioner and a patient, acclaimed author, award-winning physician, and ethicist Philip Hébert creates a brave and intimate portrait of the complex ethical questions raised by revolutionary advances in medical diagnosis and treatment. Philip Hébert addresses the complex ethical questions raised by revolutionary advances in medical treatment. This work expands upon Hébert's previous book, "Doing Right," and extends his knowledge of the field beyond medical professionals to reach the patients they treat.

In this article, I present two conceptual problems for Craver's mutual manipulability account of constitutive relevance in mechanisms. First, constitutive relevance threatens to imply causal relevance despite Craver (and Bechtel)'s claim that they are strictly distinct. Second, if (as is intuitively appealing) parthood is defined in terms of spatio-temporal inclusion, then the mutual manipulability account is prone to counterexamples, as I show by a case of endosymbiosis. I also present a methodological problem (a case of experimental underdetermination) and formulate two (...) partial, but fallible solutions based on the notions of parthood and synchronicity. (shrink)

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to develop an ethical framework for the marketing of corporate social responsibility. Methods The approach is a conceptual one based on virtue ethics and on the corporate identity literature. Furthermore, empirical research results are used to describe the opportunities and pitfalls of using marketing communication tools in the strategy of building a virtuous corporate brand. Results/conclusions An ethical framework that addresses the paradoxical relation between the consequentialist perspective many proponents of the marketing of (...) CSR adopt, and ethical perspectives which criticize an exclusive profit-oriented approach to CSR. Furthermore, three CSR strategies in relation to the marketing of CSR are discussed. For each CSR strategy it is explored how a corporation could avoid falling into the promise/performance gap. (shrink)

"Op 9 december 2011 was het precies zeventig jaar geleden dat de Joodse rechtsfilosoof, vrijdenker en humanist Leo Polak (1880-1941) in het concentratiekamp Sachsenhausen overleed. De essentie van zijn vrijdenken en humanisme getuigt van het besef van de verbondenheid van alle mensen als wezens die zich zo volledig en harmonieus mogelijk moeten kunnen ontplooien, en de erkenning van de mensheid als hoogste eenheid, hoger dan alle andere collectiviteiten die loyaliteit van mensen zouden kunnen eisen: kerk, Christendom, natie. Deze bundel bevat (...) als kern een drietal beroemde en beruchte redevoeringen van Polak uit de jaren 1931-1933; deze waren idealistisch van aard en vonden veel instemming bij met name ongelovigen. Daarnaast zijn er diverse bijdragen die een goed en soms nieuw beeld geven van de rol en betekenis van Polak voor de vrijdenkers; zo had hij op belangrijke momenten een koersbepalende rol in de geschiedenis van de vrijdenkerij."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)

Der Begriff ‚Bioethik‘ bezeichnet zumeist denjenigen Teilbereich der Angewandten Ethik, der sich mit dem Umgang mit Leben bzw. Lebewesen beschäftigt. Die Bioethik lässt sich ihrerseits in die Teilbereiche Medizinethik, Tierethik und Umweltethik untergliedern. Auch wenn diese Untergliederung durchaus gebräuchlich ist, zeigt sie doch, dass thematische Zuordnungen und disziplinäre Grenzziehungen in der Angewandten Ethik nicht unproblematisch sind.

Die Forschungs- und Wissenschaftsethik ist diejenige Teildisziplin der Angewandten Ethik, die sich mit ethischen Problemen von Forschung und Wissenschaft beschäftigt. Man kann die Forschungsethik in drei Bereiche gliedern: Ein erster Bereich hat Prinzipien und Normen zum Gegenstand, die für alle Wissenschaftler als Wissenschaftler gelten. Ein zweiter Bereich ist mit Methoden befasst, die in der Wissenschaft zur Anwendung kommen. Ein dritter Bereich der Forschungsethik beschäftigt sich schließlich mit den Zielen von Forschung bzw. mit ethischen Fragen, die solche Ziele aufwerfen.

Today, mechanisms and mechanistic explanation are very popular in philosophy of science and are deemed a welcome alternative to laws of nature and deductive‐nomological explanation. Starting from Mitchell's pragmatic notion of laws, I cast doubt on their status as a genuine alternative. I argue that (1) all complex‐systems mechanisms ontologically must rely on stable regularities, while (2) the reverse need not hold. Analogously, (3) models of mechanisms must incorporate pragmatic laws, while (4) such laws themselves need not always refer to (...) underlying mechanisms. Finally, I show that Mitchell's account is more encompassing than the mechanistic account *Received August 2008; revised January 2010. †To contact the author, please write to: Centre for Logic and Philosophy of Science, Ghent University, Blandijnberg 2, B‐9000 Belgium; e‐mail: Bert[email protected]. (shrink)

Many theories about human number representation stress the importance of a central semantic representation that includes the magnitude information of small integer numbers, and that is conceived as an abstract, compressed number line. However, thus far there has been little or no direct evidence that units and teens are represented on the same number line. In two masked priming experiments, we show that single-digit and two-digit Arabic numerals are equally well primed by an Arabic numeral with the same number of (...) digits as by an equally distant Arabic numeral with a different number of digits (e.g. the priming effect of 7 on the target 9 is the same as the priming effect of 11 on the target 9). The finding was obtained both with a number naming task and with a parity judgement task. This is in line with the hypothesis that units and teens are part of a continuous number line. (shrink)

We analyze ethical policies of firms in industrialized countries and try to find out whether culture is a factor that plays a significant role in explaining country differences. We look into the firm’s human rights policy, its governance of bribery and corruption, and the comprehensiveness, implementation and communication of its codes of ethics. We use a dataset on ethical policies of almost 2,700 firms in 24 countries. We find that there are significant differences among ethical policies of firms headquartered in (...) different countries. When we associate these ethical policies with Hofstede’s cultural indicators, we find that individualism and uncertainty avoidance are positively associated with a firm’s ethical policies, whereas masculinity and power distance are negatively related to these policies. (shrink)

This article offers a general discussion of the concept of false hope. Its ultimate aim is to clarify the meaning and the relevance of that concept for medicine and medical research. In the first part, the concept of hope is discussed. I argue that hope is more than a combination of a desire and a belief about the probability that the desire will be fulfilled. Imagination and anticipation are as well components of hope. I also discuss if hope implies orientation (...) to action. In the second part, I examine the concept of false hope. I show that hope is false if it cannot be justified epistemically. There is, I argue, an intimate relation between false hope and ignorance. Hope is justified—“realistic”—when the hoping person knows and accepts experts’ judgement about the probability of hope fulfillment. I then argue that what matters for evaluating a person’s hope is not only whether it is realistic, but also whether it is reasonable in the light of the aim and goals that a person strives for in his life. Part three goes into the question of what is morally wrong about having or causing false hope. In the fourth part, the relevance is shown of the insights from the previous parts for the debate on false hope in medicine and clinical research. (shrink)