Law & Society Blog

There was “good” rationalism, embodied by Newton’s physics, Euclidian geometry, and Leibniz’ version of the calculus (the only contribution of Leibniz that Kant would tolerate), and there was “bad” rationalism, such as Descartes’ attempt at continuing metaphysica specialis by different means…. In any event, theoretical modeling plus empirical confirmation at the fringes is precisely what Kant envisions with his concept of “sober” rationalism within the bounds of possible experience.His solution to the problem, of course, is as brilliant as it is notorious.

I posted a near final draft of my review of Michael Pawlik’s new book Person, Subjekt, B?ºrger on SSRN.

The Athenians then shift the burden of persuasion to the Melians by asking them to make their case against the invasion, but not before dictating the terms of the debate:For ourselves, we shall not trouble you with specious pretenses [of right or wrong], since you know as well as we do that right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.Having been “enjoin[ed] to let right alone and talk only of interest,” the Melians make the following arguments: It is in Athens’ interest not to “destroy what is our common protection, the privilege of being allowed in danger to invoke what is fair and right.”… In addition, the barrier between international and domestic laws is becoming increasingly porous, as evidenced by the outright incorporation of international law into the body of laws governing the European Union and, to a lesser degree, by the U.S. Supreme Court’s (unsurprisingly controversial) practice of interpreting domestic laws in light of international laws.So maybe we are in a better position today than the Melians were 2,500 years ago. And it may well be a special obligation of the lawyers and the legal philosophers as guardians of the rule of law, to prevent exercises of unmitigated Realpolitik by insisting on respect for the rule of law in all affairs of the state.

hook up your neurons to mine, I can only connect to my own thoughts, not to yours.Third, the goal of science is not to explain but to make predictions, to bring order to our perceptions, and to enable us to act successfully in ever more creative ways.Fourth, for most everyday actions, the delusion of ontological objectivity is a useful shorthand. But once the presence of the observer cannot be ignored, for example, in quantum physics but also in questions of ethics, we need to abandon our simplifying assumptions and take the limitations of our cognitive apparatus into account.On a more speculative note, the persistence of the “subject perceives object” approach to cognition may well be explained by the fact that both subject and object are creations of our mind.

Much confusion about the goals of retributivism or the absence of such, stems from statements such as:For retributivists, punishment is not a means to an end, rather, it is an end in itself, for example, as the affirmation of the unchanged persistence of a legitimate normative order, despite the crime.What this really means is that punishment is justified as an expression of a positive value, here, the affirmation of a legitimate normative order…. In other words, the goals of retributivism are very different from those of consequentionalism (one is normative, the other is factual), even though every factual state of affairs brought about by the pursuit of retributivist goals could also serve as an end for a consequentionalist justification of punishment.

The driving force of that change, the enabling faculty, was the marriage of mathematics with empiricism, that is, scientific reasoning as explored by Galileo Galilei, Rene Descartes, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Isaac Newton and others and as described by Karl Popper and the critical rationalists, taking into account the occasional dead end and a series of turf wars among an ever more highly specialized scientific community, which accounts for much of what Thomas Kuhn describes in the Structure of Scientific Revolutions.”Hold on,” says the formalist, “mathematics and empiricism have been part and parcel of the philosophical discourse ever since before Plato…. The defining discovery of Greek philosophy was to provide a general, ontological explanation for the ubiquitous experience of change and invariance (some things change, others don’t), that is, the discovery of matter and form, of the empirical world and the world of ideas, of body and soul. Mathematics, in particular geometry and early number theory (most of which we would see as numerology today), had immediately been identified as part of the ideal, unchanging world, whereas empiricism was the method of choice to learn about our changing environment.