This semester, I’m teaching Philosophy of Law–again. My syllabus, as always, is a new one, and reflects an altered orientation and focus from those of days past. The current edition is fairly simple: it kicks off with Lon Fuller‘s ‘The Case of the Speluncean Explorers,’ excerpts from H. L. A Hart‘s The Concept of Law,Continue reading “A Persistent Difficulty In Teaching Philosophy Of Law”
Tag Archives: positivism
Nietzsche’s Inversion Of Natural Law In The Genealogy Of Morals
The radically constructive nature of legal and economic concepts emerges quite clearly in the brilliant second essay of The Genealogy of Morals. Here, Nietzsche sets out his view of how the concept of a contract creates persons, how the ethical subject is not found but made. For Nietzsche, the law, a set of human practices,Continue reading “Nietzsche’s Inversion Of Natural Law In The Genealogy Of Morals”
Property As Legal Construct
Property appears an abstract, transcendent, metaphysical concept from afar but on closer inspection reveals itself to be legally constructed. Like ‘person,’ property obtains its philosophical traction from a legal, economic, and social imperative to distribute resources, and thus, wealth and power. As a canonical legal textbook puts it, the “property system” that results from aContinue reading “Property As Legal Construct”
Durkheim On Social Facts As Things: Methodology As Metaphysics
In The Rules of Sociological Method (The Free Press, 1982, pp. 35-36) Émile Durkheim writes: The proposition which states that social facts must be treated as things…stirred up the most opposition. It was deemed paradoxical and scandalous for us to assimilate to the realities of the external world those of the social world. This was singularly toContinue reading “Durkheim On Social Facts As Things: Methodology As Metaphysics”
Horkheimer And Adorno On The ‘Convergence’ Of Art And Science
In Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments (University of Stanford Press, Cultural Memory in the Present Series, ed. Gunzelin Schmid Noerr, p. 13, 2002) Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno write: The prevailing antithesis between art and science, which rends the two apart as areas of culture in order to make them jointly manageable as areas of cultures,Continue reading “Horkheimer And Adorno On The ‘Convergence’ Of Art And Science”
Samir Chopra 