?The person is a monad with windows?: sketch of a conceptual history of ‘person’ in Russia

The basic concepts ??person?? (Person), I/self (Ich) and ??subject?? (Subjekt) structuring the Russian discourse of personhood (Personalit?t) developed during the philosophical discussions of the 1820s?C1840s. The development occurred in the course of an intense reception of German Idealism and Romanticism. Characteristic of this process is that the modern meaning of personhood going back to the theological and natural-law interpretations of the person in Western Europe does not exist in the Russian cultural consciousness. Therefore the Russian concepts of personhood demonstrate the influence of the semantic innovations of Romanticism. Correspondingly, the semantic core of the Russian discourses on personhood is not the idea of an ??autonomous person?? but that of an ??unique individuality??. Here, personhood is not the indefeasible attribute of every man, but the mark of inimitable individuality. Accordingly, the basic distinction underlying the discourse on personhood in Russia is not the differentiation between ??person?? and ??thing?? as in the European tradition, but the distinction between ??individual?? and (anonymous) ??community??. Also, in the meaning of the concept of I/self the dominant differentiation is not that between I/self (Ich) and not-I/not-self (Nicht-Ich), but that between I and We. This discourse on personhood centring on the idea of individuality took form in Russia starting in the middle of the nineteenth century, in particular in aesthetics, psychology, and educational theory, as well as in the philosophy of history. The comparative intercultural analysis of the history of concepts pertaining to personhood in the German-Russian cultural transfer brings to light the dialectic of European modernity in which a degree of tension is visible between the idea of personal autonomy and individuality.     

Modern Philosophy,the Subject,and the God of the Bible

In my paper, I undertake to show that the God of the Bible is the subject of modern philosophy, i.e., that philosophy is biblical and that the Bible is philosophical. Central to the argument of my paper is an analysis of the fundamental difference between the philosophy of Aristotle (consistent with Socrates and Plato), as based on the law of contradiction and thus on the contradictory opposition between necessity and existence, and the philosophy of, in particular, Spinoza and Kant, as based on the transcendental logic of the necessary relationship of thought and existence. Thus, I argue that the ontological argument (proving the existence of God) demonstrates the necessary existence of the thinking subject and of the subject thought, at once human and divine. In short, metaphysics is practical reason, the practice of doing unto others what you want others to do unto you, and reason is metaphysical practice, the practice of proving that there is one thing that you, a subject, cannot think without it necessarily existing, and that is the other subject (the neighbor/God).     

性别选择与法律之回应——法理视野中的变性手术

变性人的出现对社会秩序及法律制度提出了挑战。自然人生而具有的人作为社会主体定在的自由和健康权利,为变性人享有性别选择的权利提供了法理支撑。在权利确认后,很有必要在变性手术的对象、施行者及程序上作出规范的应对,而变性人术后的社会角色及权利保护也应该得到法律的适时回应,以实现法的秩序、公正等价值。     

Atmospheres of law: Senses,affects, lawscapes

In this article, I deal with airs and sounds and scents, while keeping an eye on the law. My field of enquiry is the interstitial area between sensory and affective occurrences, namely sensory experiences that are traditionally thought to be a causal result of external stimuli, and affective experiences that are mostly associated with emotional changes and generally allude to something internal. I am arguing that there is no constructive difference between internal and external origin of occurrences. In its stead, I suggest the concept of atmosphere, namely an attempt at understanding affective occurrences as excessive, collective, spatial and elemental. However, it quickly becomes apparent that an atmosphere is legally determined. The law controls affective occurrences by regulating property of sensory stimulation. At the same time, the law guides bodies into corridors of sensory compulsion – an aspect of which is consumerism in capitalist societies. The law achieves this by allowing certain sensory options to come forth while suppressing others, something which is particularly obvious in cases of intellectual property protection that capture the sensorial. I deal with the law in its material, spatial manifestation and in particular through what I have called the ‘lawscape’, namely the fusion of space and normativity. I employ a broadly Deleuzian methodology with insights from radical geography, affective studies, and urban and critical legal theory in order to develop and link the various parts of the text.     

The Ego: the problem and the term as treated by Russian philosophy

The starting point of the investigation is the correspondence between the term and concept of Ego (“I”) and the various types of experience. Two main ways of introducing and applying of the term “I” (Ego) in Russian philosophy are investigated from the semantic-analytical point of view. The first takes the Ego as initially existed either as a spiritual substance or a given form uniting experiences. This way of treating is realized in L. Lopatin’s and V. Soloviev’s philosophical teachings. The second containing some moments of reflexion on the concept treated the Ego as a result of experience. It was developed in M. Karinskij und G. ?pet. In context of difference between the Ego and the subject or consciousness the question of the owner of consciousness is considered.     

Philosophy and 'The Life of the Law'

abstract   Focusing on the criminal law, I discuss three ways in which analytical philosophers might contribute to the development or health of the law (and of legal theory). The first is as humble under-labourers, who seek only to clarify legal rules and doctrines, but not to criticise them. This modest conception of the role of philosophy, however, proves to be untenable: clarification must become rational reconstruction — an attempt to make rational sense of the law; and rational reconstruction must involve at least an internal critique, which appraises the law in terms of ends, values or principles that the reconstruction discovers within the law. Such an internal critique must then also point beyond itself, to an external critique that appraises law in terms of the broader and deeper political and moral values by which states should be structured; the paper ends by noting some of the problems that such an external critique faces, and some of the problems that philosophers must face in trying to engage with the world of public policy .     

Speaking of persons,human and divine

Christians commonly speak of and to God as ‘a person’. The propriety of such talk depends on how the concept of a person is being used and understood, and that concept is much contested in contemporary analytic philosophy. In this article, I note the presuppositions of one current debate about what it is to be a human person, and then propose an alternative approach to persons—both human and divine—that draws upon the Thomistic philosophical and theological tradition. In this tradition, ‘person’ is neither an essence-determining kind term, nor a merely nominal or functional kind term, but is applicable analogously to entities of various ‘kinds’ (e.g. humans, angels and God). The origins of this account in Aquinas’ theology of the Trinity will be examined, and I will conclude by noting a recent development of Thomas’ thought in relation to what it is to be a human person.     

Narrative Unity as a Condition of Personhood

Abstract: In this article I critically discuss a claim made by several writers in philosophy and the social sciences that for an individual to count as a person, a single personality, or the subject of a life, the experiences of the subject in question must take a narrative form. I argue that narrativity is a misleading and, in some ways of understanding it, implausible condition of what it is that adds unity to personhood and personality. I pursue this critique by considering canonical accounts of narrativity in philosophy and literary studies. I consider those connections between events that must hold for the sequence to be considered a narrative: causal, teleological, and thematic connections. I argue that for each of these, the condition that experiential sequences (for a given subject) must have this structure is empty: any life sequence that is reflected upon in an interpretive spirit can meet it. What the condition of narrativity amounts to, then, is the more basic requirement that the person must be able to look upon the factors and events of her life with a certain interpretive reflection, whether or not those factors and events have any particular narrative unity in a traditional sense.     

The Institutionality Of Legal Validity

The most influential theory of law in current analytic legal philosophy is legal positivism, which generally understands law to be a kind of institution. The most influential theory of institutions in current analytic social philosophy is that of John Searle. One would hope that the two theories are compatible, and in many ways they certainly are. But one incompatibility that still needs ironing out involves the relation of the social rule that undergirds the validity of any legal system (H.L.A. Hart's rule of recognition) to Searle's notion of codification: the idea that institutions need official declarations of their constitutive rules in order to enjoy the full benefits of institutions. The incompatibility arises from the fact that, in order to do its institutional work, the basic validity rule must be codified in Searle's sense—yet, given the particular role it has in legal positivism, it may be impossible to codify in the Searlean sense. In this paper I develop the incompatibility in detail, consider and reject consigning the basic validity rule to Searle's “Background” capacities that support institutional facts, and conclude that the best route to eliminating it while doing a minimum of damage to the two theories is to make a slight emendation to Searle's theory of institutions.     

Bealer and the autonomy of philosophy

George Bealer has provided an elaborate defense of the practice of appealing to intuition in philosophy. In the present paper, I argue that his defense fails. First, I argue that Bealer’s theory of determinate concept possession, even if true, would not establish the “autonomy” of philosophy. That is, even if he is correct about what determinate concept possession consists in, it would not follow that it is possible to answer the central questions of philosophy by critical reflection on our intuitions. Furthermore, I argue that Bealer’s account of determinate concept possession in fact faces serious problems. Accordingly, I conclude that Bealer does not succeed in vindicating the appeal to intuition in philosophy.     

Die neo-inklusivistiese benadering tot religieuse pluraliteit

Abstract

Neo-pragmatists Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish have recently argued that philosophy has no consequences for legal practice (except, in the case of Fish, in so far as it carries rhetorical force). They have asserted not only that philosophy cannot provide absolute metaphysical foundations for legal practice, but also that philosophy cannot be used to criticise law. This essay examines Fish and Rorty’s reasons for denying the practical force of philosophy. Although I agree with Rorty and Fish’s non-foundationalism, I argue that in practice lawyers employ discursive categories and concepts that can be described as philosophical. I suggest also that philosophy has a critical function and that the characterisation of philosophy offered by these theorists amounts to a conservative assertion of the formal completeness and substantive justice of existing liberal legal systems. Against Fish and Rorty, I argue and selectively demonstrate that lawyers can usefully draw upon ‘public ironists’ such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Derrida to criticise and improve upon extant legal practices.     

Law, Strategy and Democracy: A Response to Duff

abstract   In this response to Antony Duff's paper, I raise doubts about the method of moving from internal to external critique, suggesting that external critique, focusing on more basic principles in moral and political philosophy, has primacy, and that internal critique, if it is done well, will very quickly turn external. I then suggest a different distinction: that between pure and strategic philosophical work, suggesting that more strategic work might be done in legal philosophy to improve the impact of philosophical work on those more concerned with policy. Finally, I suggest that more philosophically focused work on law and democracy has become increasingly important in the light of developments in criminal justice, something missing from Duff's account .     

Autonomy and radical evil: a Kantian challenge to constitutivism

Properly understood, Kant’s moral philosophy is incompatible with constitutivism. According to the constitutivist, being subject to the moral law cannot be a matter of free choice, and failure to comply with it is to be understood as a deficiency in one’s integrity as an intentional agent. I reconstruct Kant’s arguments to the conclusion that immorality, moral evil, consists in choosing to give one’s unity as an intentional agent supremacy over the moral law, and that one’s being subject to the moral law must be one’s own free choice. And I explain how Kant’s doctrine of radical evil, according to which we cannot be subject to the moral law without actually being morally evil, protects this conclusion from entailing the denial of the unconditionally binding character of moral principles, which character constitutivists correctly identify as the central concern of Kant’s – or any – moral philosophy.     

Situationism and the Concept of a Situation

Abstract: The concept of a situation underlying the debate between moral situationists and dispositionists conceals various underexplored complexities. Some of those issues have been engaged recently in the so‐called psychology of situations, but they have been slow to receive attention in mainstream philosophy. I invoke various distinctions among situations, and show how situationists have selectively chosen certain types of situations that, for conceptual reasons, skew the argument in their favour. I introduce the concept of a ‘virtue‐calibrated situation’, and argue that if the person–situation debate is to move forward in philosophy as it has in psychology, it must focus on such situations. I bring to bear evidence from analytic and continental philosophy, as well as from social and personality psychology.     

Certainty,reasonableness and argumentation in law

This paper defends a position that parts ways with the positivist view of legal certainty and reasonableness. I start out with a reconstruction of this view and move on to argue that an adequate analysis of certainty and reasonableness calls for an alternative approach, one based on the acknowledgement that argumentation is key to determining the contents, structure, and boundaries of a legal system. Here I claim that by endorsing a dialectical notion of rationality this alternative account espouses an ambitious approach to reasoning in law and conceives of the theory of legal argumentation as the vantage point from which to analyze legal systems and tackle the main problems connected with their existence. Next, I look at what this alternative approach does for the way we should go about treating certainty and reasonableness, considered singularly as well as in their reciprocal relationship. I conclude on this basis that when argumentation receives its due emphasis in law we have to redefine certainty and reasonableness and recast their connection as non-conflictive.     

The Self: the Incredulous Stare Articulated

This paper is an examination of Galen Strawson’s theory of the human person as a succession of momentary selves (or SESMETs: Subjects of Experience that are Single MEntal Things). Insofar as there is a clear distinction between enduring objects and events or processes, SESMETs would seem to partake of the features of both, for they are at once short‐lived subjects of consciousness and brief episodes of consciousness. Strawson in fact rejects the object/ process distinction, and contends that there is no sense in which a SESMET is a process and a rock is not a process. Strawson’s rejection of the object/process distinction is essential to his attempt to meet the charge that the concept of a SESMET is an incoherent conflation of the concept ‘object’ and the concept ‘process.’ But many philosophers will find the rejection of the object/process distinction objectionable on general metaphysical grounds. I suggest that these philosophers (I am one of them) and Strawson will not be able usefully to discuss issues in the philosophy of mind (such as his theory of SESMETs) till they have reached agreement about what the most fundamental ontological categories are.     

The concept of Lichnost’ in criminal law theory, 1860s–1900s

This essay discusses criminal law theories in late Imperial Russia. It argues that, although the political climate of Reform and Counter Reform effectively undermined attempts to implement new legislation premised on the idea of the ‘rights-enabled person’ (pravovaya lichnost’), paradoxically, it fostered the growth of juridical scholarship. Russian criminal law theorists engaged critically with Western juridical science, which, beginning in the 1870s, witnessed a shift away from absolutist theories inspired by the classics of philosophical idealism towards various strains of positivism arguing for the restoration of the person as a concrete, physiological being. However, while Russian scholars were drawn to these new trends of criminal anthropology and the sociology of crime, they were also obliged to take stock of an indigenous legal culture that scarcely differentiated between pravo and zakon, together with a long tradition of customary practices that equated crime and punishment with sin and redemption.