Law & Society Blog

So recently my alma mater’s student paper, The Gazette, published their annual spoof issue. One satirical article, titled “Labia Majora Carnage”, included a mock-scene which involved the rape of a local feminist-activist by the chief of police. Many readers interpreted the passage to be trivializing rape, if not promoting it. It caught a lot of […]

Among the many gems on YouTube are rare videos of philosophers. This is the first time that I have seen Adorno, Horkheimer, Heidegger and Husserl!
Vilem Flusser
On communication, part 1, part 2
Juergen Habermas
Interview
Jean Baudrillard
2004 Lecture
Theodor Adorno
Blasting Joan Baez
On humanity
Max Horkeimer
On critical theory
Jean Paul Sartre
About himself, parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
Michel Foucault
Discussion with Noam Chomsky, […]

In Hobbes’ state of nature, self-interested robots descend into mutual warfare, because they cannot resolve their resource conflicts by non-violent means. If every robot is programmed to maximize its own welfare, if all goods are rivalrous, and if there is no powerful central authority to change the cost/benefit calculus, then a state of mutual warfare […]

The morality of the market is one of the most significant issues not only in ethics but also, at least since Durkheim and Weber, in sociology. As is often the case, the more pervasive a practice, the harder it is to describe and analyze. Marion Fourcade and Kieran Healy, in their forthcoming paper Moral Views […]

Matt Wood argues:
After just reading two articles dealing with Jurgen Habermas’s theory of communicative action, I think I can take a tentative step towards fleshing out my arguments for the role of dialogue in the definition of law. According to this helpful paper, which summarizes Habermas’s theory of communicative action (and quotes from his book […]

George Spencer Brown’s Laws of Form are routinely cited in the context of theories dealing with self-referential processes, autopoiesis and second-order-cybernetics. Niklas Luhmann, in particular, refers to Spencer Brown all the time and makes extensive use of his terminology: law of calling, law of crossing, re-entry, etc. I never understood what the buzz was all […]

Of all proofs for the existence of god, the teleological argument or the argument from design is the most commonly invoked: The watch proves the existence of the watchmaker. Of course, the argument from design is a non-sequitur and fails as a result of some well-known flaws documented elsewhere. But there’s another noteworthy weakness of […]

Here is a nice article on the contemporary free will debate by Dennis Overbye.
Mark Hallett, a researcher with the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, said, “Free will does exist, but it i€™s a perception, not a power or a driving force. People experience free will. They have the sense they are free.”
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Because, according to Robert Nozick, intellectuals can’t get over the fact that school’s over.
It is surprising that intellectuals oppose capitalism so. Other groups of comparable socio-economic status do not show the same degree of opposition in the same proportions. Statistically, then, intellectuals are an anomaly. … Intellectuals now expect to be the most highly valued […]

We have discussed the theory of cultural cognition extensively on this blog in the past (for example here, here, and here)…. Cultural cognition, in the essence, posits a causal relationship between values (and factual beliefs.