The spirit of the laws is a symbol reflecting the ontological status and transcendental ideals of the system of positive law. The article analyses historical links between the romantic philosophy of the spirit of the nation (Volksgeist), which subsumed Montesquieu’s general spirit of the laws under the concept of ethnic culture, and recent politics of cultural and ethnic identity. Although criticising attempts at legalising ethnic collective identities, the article does not simply highlight the virtues of demos and the superiority of (...) civic culture against the vices of ethnos and the regressive nature of ethnic politics of identity. Instead, the author argues that the civil democratic concept of political identity is part of the more general process of social differentiation: unlike the pre-political ethnic concept of identity, it can be converted to generalised democratic procedures and thus dismantle the totalitarian claims of cultural identity politics. (shrink)

This article reinterprets the Kelsen-Schmitt debate in the context of social systems theory and rethinks its major concepts as part of legal and political self-reference and systemic differentiation. In Kelsen?s case, it is the exclusion of sovereignty from juridical logic that opens a way to the self-reference of positive law. Similarly, Schmitt constructed his concept of the political as a self-referential system of political operations protected from the social environment by the medium of power. The author argues that the process (...) of legal and political globalisation rules out the possibility of formulating substantive theories of the state associating this particular social organisation with metaphysical values and a self-validating collective identity. Kelsen and Schmitt continue to inspire current theories of non-metaphysical globalised law and politics. However, the constitutional state and sovereignty need to be reformulated as a meeting point of functionally differentiated and globalised legal and political communications and not as their ultimate end. (shrink)

The article focuses on the problem of constitutional symbolism in functionally differentiated societies and its relevance to legal, political, and moral systems. The first part analyses differences between the three systems and their constitutional context. The second part concentrates on the moral symbolic function of modern constitutions and its temporal dimension. It shows that the “good/bad” moral code of constitutions draws on expressive symbolism and transforms it into evaluative symbolism and dogma of morality. The final part analyses the prospective character (...) of modern constitution‐making and its symbolic selectivity regarding the past. The paper concludes by emphasising the systemic pluralisation effect of constitution‐making and the impossibility of constituting systems of “pure” law, morality, and politics. (shrink)

The author analyzes fictions of legal positivist philosophy and their role in the scientific legitimation of modern law and political domination. The original function of legalist fictions was the establishment of legal science, which would be autonomous and independent of other social sciences and public morality. In the second half of the 20th century, legal positivist philosophy has nevertheless adopted the fiction of the just law as its scientific legitimation fiction and incorporated moral and political discourse into legal science, again.Legal (...) positivism and its critiques within the discourse of the sociology of law and critical legal science keep the image of a hierarchical and centralized legitimation of law. Paradoxically, current legal philosophy and theory searching for a universally valid legitimation scheme is full of many different legitimations and reveals their growing plurality and the impossibility of establishing one sovereign legitimation scheme in the current social, theoretical and political condition. (shrink)

The article examines recent theories of legal and constitutional pluralism, especially their adoption of sociological perspectives and criticisms of the concept of sovereignty. The author argues that John Griffiths's original dichotomy of “weak” and “strong” pluralism has to be reassessed because “weak” jurisprudential theories contain useful sociological analyses of the internal differentiation and operations of specific legal orders, their overlapping, parallel validity and collisions in global society. Using the sociological methodology of legal pluralism theories and critically elaborating on Teubner's societal (...) constitutionalism, the author subsequently reformulates the question of sovereignty as a sociological problem of complex power operations communicated through the constitutional state's organization and reconfigured within the global legal and political framework. (shrink)

This article focuses on theoretical reflections on sovereignty and constitutionalism in the context of the globalization and Europeanisation of the nation states, their politics, and legal systems. Starting from a critical assessment of the Kelsen-Schmitt polemic, the author claims that sovereignty needs to be analysed by the sociological method in order to disclose its current structural differentiation. The constitution of society may be imagined as the multitude of self-constituted and functionally differentiated social subsystems. The constitutional pluralism argument subsequently reconceptualizes sovereignty (...) as socially differentiated and divided between specific subsystems. The EU's differentiated constitutional domain and the paradox of divided sovereignty are used as examples of profound structural and semantic changes in contemporary national and transnational societies. While the sovereign nation-state institutions have become marginalized in political structures of European societies, the self-constitutionalization of the functionally differentiated EU legal system proceeds by internalizing the concept of divided sovereignty and using it semantically as its mode of self-reference. (shrink)

‘We must newly conceive the time of law. To do so, the book calls for a more temporally attuned constitutional theory that places a principle of anti-reification at the centre of its jurisprudentia...

New Proposals for New Questions Nuevas propuestas para nuevas cuestiones In six sections, the volume deals with different questions of political philosophy. The first section focuses on democratic theories, the second on conceptual debates, discussing topics such as collective rights, the terrorist phenomenon, Libertarianism and conceptions of freedom. In a third section on contemporary debates, perspectives on sovereignity and legitimacy as well as discourse theory versus political liberalism are discussed. The volume also features essays on democracy and law, and in (...) a section entitled oJudicial construction of democracyo papers on constitutional reviews by judges in the Netherlands as well as the construction of democracy in the context of Latin-American democracies. Finally, in the last section the volume deals with the European Constitutional Treatise, analysing the arguments and examining the legitimacy crisis and the main objections displayed against this treatise. Contents I. On Democratic theory / Teoria de la democracia: Eerik Lagerspetz: The Problem of the Common Good in Democratic Theory Sergiy Maksymov: The Kantian Project of the Law Governed Society and New Democracies II. Conceptual debates / Debates conceptuales: Martin Blanchard: Recognition and the Case of Indigenous Reparations: A Habermasian Critique of Habermas Bronik Matwijkiw: The failed Model of Terrorism Susumu Morimura: The Libertarian View of Human Nature Jonathan E. Soeharno: Freedom as Second Nature. Exploring the value of Hegel's concept of Autonomous Personality for Global institutional theory Hashimoto Tsutomu: On the Concept of Positive and Negative Liberty III. Contemporary debates / Debates contemporaneos: Terhi Kiiskinen: Sovereignty Revisited: On Inalienable Constitutional Power Luiz B. Leite Araujo: A Decade of Debate: Discourse Theory versus Political Liberalism IV. Democracy and law / Democracia y derecho: Kenneth E. Himma: Does it really mather whether a Judicial Decision is morally Legitimate? The practical implications of Judicial Illegitimacy in a otherwise Legitimate State Carl Lebeck: Commitments, Rules and the limits of Constitutionalism Oliver W. Lembcke: Exception Rules? Freedom and the Order in a State of Exception Bart van Klink: Does Necessity knows no Laws? Application of Law in a State of Exception Costanza Margiotta: Ideas and Values of the oLegalo State Jiri Priban: Constitution-Making. Morality and Legal Symbolism: on Identity, Temporality and Differentiation of the legal, political and moral Systems V. Judicial construction of democracy / Construccion judicial de la democracia: Maurice Adams: Judging the Constitution: the Third Way. Some reflections on the introduction of Constitutional Review by Judges in The Netherlands Larry Alexander: What is the Problem of Judicial Review? Roberto Corona Copado: Las reglas del juego democratico. La Suprema Corte de Justicia de Mexico en la solucion de controversias entre organos del poder politico desde 1995 Jose de J. Ibarra Cardenas: La construccion judicial de la Democracia en Iberoamerica VI. Deliberation on European constitutional norm / Deliberacion sobre la nueva constitucion europea: Olaf Tans: Deliberating European Constitucional Norms. An Analysis of arguments Carla M. Zoethout: The Court and the Charter or Who Guards the Court of Justice of the EU under the new Constitution?. (shrink)

In this book, Jiri Benovsky defends the view that he doesn't exist. In this book, he also defends the view that this book itself doesn't exist. But this did not prevent him to write the book, and although in Benovsky's view you don't exist either, this does not prevent you to read it. Benovsky defends a brand of non-exceptionalist eliminativism. Some eliminativists, typically focusing on ordinary material objects such as chairs and hammers, make exceptions, for instance for blue whales (that (...) is, living beings) or for persons (that is, conscious organisms). Benovsky takes one by one all types of allegedly existing objects like chairs, whales, and persons and shows that from the metaphysical point of view they are more trouble than they are worth – we are much better off without them. He thus defends an eliminativist view about ordinary objects as well as the 'no-Self' view, where he explores connections between metaphysics, phenomenology, and Buddhist thought. He then also considers the case of aesthetic objects, focusing on musical works and photographs, and shows that the claim of their non-existence solves the many problems that arise when one tries to find an appropriate ontological category for them, and that such an eliminativist view is more natural than what we might have thought. The arguments provided here are always topic-specific: each type of entity is given its own type of treatment, thus proving a varied and solid foundation for a generalized, non-exceptionalist, full-blown eliminativist worldview. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue that (non-presentist) endurantism is incompatible with the view that properties are universals. I do so by putting forward a very simple objection that forces the endurantist to embrace tropes, rather than universals. I do not claim that this is bad news for the endurantist—trope theory seems to me by all means more appealing than universals—rather, I would like to see this result as a further motivation to embrace tropes. I then also put forward a (more (...) controversial) reason to believe that at least some versions of perdurantism also require tropes rather than universals. (shrink)

A bare individual was conceived by Tichý as an individual such as if the property the individual instantiates is non-trivial , it is possible for the individual to lack it ; and for any trivial property that it cannot lack this kind of property. The exact readings of Tichý’s original formulations of are subjected to a detailed analysis to reveal that any of them is refutable by means of Cmorejian objection that there exist contingent properties which are partly essential . (...) To avoid such objection, the present paper attempts to rebuild Tichý’s definitions into viable ones. (shrink)

The main aim of this study is to explain passage 35b4-37a2 of Plato’s Timaeus which deals with three main topics: the mathematization of the world’s soul, its movement, and its binding to the world’s body. First, it is argued that the mathematical structure of the world-soul allows it to participate in and be sensitive to harmony, which is essential for the correct workings of its cognitive capacities. Second, the division of the world-soul to the circle of the same and the (...) circles of the different and its self-motion comes in. This allows it to ‘touch’ and cognize the forms and the material things, as well as rule the movement of the corporeal world and care for it. In this aspect, the world-soul continues the process that started with the original creative act of the demiurge. Third, it is argued that the description of the world-soul’s binding to the world-body entails its conception as a spatially extended entity, which, in turn, explains of the possibility of an interaction between the corporeal world and its soul. (shrink)

Model-theoretic concepts of saturation and categoricity are studied in the context of accessible categories. Accessible categories which are categorical in a strong sense are related to categories of $M$-sets ($M$ is a monoid). Typical examples of such categories are categories of $\lambda$-saturated objects.

Metaphysical theories are often counter‐intuitive. But they also often are strongly supported and motivated by intuitions. One way or another, the link between intuitions and metaphysics is a strong and important one, and there is hardly any metaphysical discussion where intuitions do not play a crucial role. In this article, I will be interested in a particular kind of such intuitions, namely those that come, at least partly, from experience. There seems to be a route from experience to metaphysics, and (...) this is the core of my interest here. In order to better understand such ‘arguments from experience’ and the kind of relationship there is between this type of intuitions and metaphysical theories, I shall examine four particular cases where a kind of experience‐based intuition seems to motivate or support a metaphysical theory. At the end of the day, I shall argue that this route is a treacherous one, and that in all of the four cases I shall concentrate on, phenomenological considerations are in fact orthogonal to the allegedly ‘corresponding’ metaphysical claims. An anti‐realist view of metaphysics will emerge. (shrink)

Pavel Materna proposed valuable explications of concept and conceptual system. After their introduction, we contrast conceptual systems with (a novel notion of) derivation systems. Derivation systems differ from conceptual systems especially in including derivation rules. This enables us to show close connections among the realms of objects, their concepts, and reasoning with concepts.

Tématem studie je hra jako antropologický, kulturní a estetický fenomén. Pojednává o Schillerově koncepci hry jako projevu lidské svobody a Huizingově pojetí herního jednání jako zdroji lidské kultury. Je též pokusem zhodnotit typologii her R. Cailloise a posoudit přínos Finkova a Gadamerova existenciálního a kosmologického pojetí hry. K analýze těchto teoretiků přidává typ herní aktivity, kterou představuje "zahrávání si" (s někým).

This open access book is about exploring interesting borderline cases of art. It discusses the cases of gustatory and olfactory artworks, proprioceptive artworks, intellectual artworks, as well as the vague limits between painting and photography. The book focuses on the author’s research about what counts as art and what does not, as well as on the nature of these limits. Overall, the author defends a very inclusive view, 'extending' the limits of art, and he argues for its virtues. Some of (...) the limits discussed concern our senses, some concern vagueness and fuzzy boundaries between different types of works of art, some concern the amount of human intention and intervention in the process of creation of an artwork, and some concern the border between art and science. In these various ways, by understanding better such borderline cases, Benovsky suggests that we get a better grip on an understanding of the nature of art. (shrink)

Metaphysical theories are beautiful. At the end of this book, Jiri Benovsky defends the view that metaphysical theories possess aesthetic properties and that these play a crucial role when it comes to theory evaluation and theory choice.Before we get there, the philosophical path the author proposes to follow starts with three discussions of metaphysical equivalence. Benovsky argues that there are cases of metaphysical equivalence, cases of partial metaphysical equivalence, as well as interesting cases of theories that are not equivalent. Thus, (...) claims of metaphysical equivalence can only be raised locally. The slogan is: the best way to do meta-metaphysics is to do first-level metaphysics.To do this work, Benovsky focuses on the nature of primitives and on the role they play in each of the theories involved. He emphasizes the utmost importance of primitives in the construction of metaphysical theories and in the subsequent evaluation of them.He then raises the simple but complicated question: how to make a choice between competing metaphysical theories? If two theories are equivalent, then perhaps we do not need to make a choice. But what about all the other cases of non-equivalent "equally good" theories? Benovsky uses some of the theories discussed in the first part of the book as examples and examines some traditional meta-theoretical criteria for theory choice (various kinds of simplicity, compatibility with physics, compatibility with intuitions, explanatory power, internal consistency,...) only to show that they do not allow us to make a choice.But if the standard meta-theoretical criteria cannot help us in deciding between competing non-equivalent metaphysical theories, how then shall we make that choice? This is where Benovsky argues that metaphysical theories possess aesthetic properties – grounded in non-aesthetic properties – and that these play a crucial role in theory choice and evaluation. This view, as well as all the meta-metaphysical considerations discussed throughout the book, then naturally lead the author to a form of anti-realism, and at the end of the journey he offers reasons to think better of the kind of anti-realist view he proposes to embrace. www.jiribenovsky.org. (shrink)

In this paper, I examine various theories of persistence through time under presentism. In Part I, I argue that both perdurantist views (namely, the worm view and the stage view) suffer, in combination with presentism, from serious difficulties and should be rejected. In Part II, I discuss the presentist endurantist view, to see that it does avoid the difficulties of the perdurantist views, and consequently that it does work, but at a price that some may consider as being very high: (...) its ontological commitments to platonic universals and to the substratum theory, that as we shall see follow from the combination of endurantism with presentism, will perhaps not be to everyone's taste. (shrink)

Un des problèmes persistants pour la philosophie pratique est de découvrir un procédé adéquat pour justifier des lois dont la finalité est de réguler le fonctionnement des démocraties constitutionnelles. Les libéraux partisans de la raison publique nient que cette justification puisse provenir de doctrines substantielles, étant donné que les lois doivent pouvoir être justifiées par tous les citoyens (raisonnables). La tradition de la loi naturelle offre un test utile quant à la plausibilité de cette thèse. L’article montre comment les deux (...) versions du libéralisme de la raison publique diffèrent quant à leur acceptation de raisons tirées du droit naturel, et pourquoi, étant donné l’influence de leurs points de départs disparates sur les critères normatifs par lesquels elles évaluent les lois, les partisans du droit naturel ont de bonnes raisons de les rejeter toutes les deux. (shrink)

The claim that the having of aesthetic properties supervenes on the having of non-aesthetic properties has been widely discussed and, in various ways, defended. In this paper, I will show that even if it is sometimes true that a supervenience relation holds between aesthetic properties and the 'subvenient' non-aesthetic ones, it is not the interesting relation in the neighbourhood. As we shall see, a richer, asymmetric and irreflexive relation is required, and I shall defend the claim that the more-and-more-popular relation (...) of grounding does a much better job than supervenience. (shrink)

There are three main traditional accounts of vagueness : one takes it as a genuinely metaphysical phenomenon, one takes it as a phenomenon of ignorance, and one takes it as a linguistic or conceptual phenomenon. In this paper I first very briefly present these views, especially the epistemicist and supervaluationist strategies, and shortly point to some well-known problems that the views carry. I then examine a 'statistical epistemicist' account of vagueness that is designed to avoid precisely these problems – it (...) will be a view that provides an account of the phenomenon of vagueness as coming from our linguistic practices, while insisting that meaning supervenes on use, and that our use of vague terms does yield sharp and precise meanings, which we ignore, thus allowing bivalence to hold. (shrink)

During the Czechoslovak normalization era (roughly from the 1970s to the 1980s), the Czech lawyer Vladimír Čermák, who later became a Justice of the newly established Constitutional Court of the Czech Republic after the breakdown of the Communist regime, authored a monumental piece called The Question of Democracy. Although this ambitious work has no equal in the Czech context, no attention has been paid to it in the English-speaking world. The present article aims to fill this gap by analyzing the (...) most original aspects of Čermák’s political thought. First, I present Greek tragedy, Plato, and Augustine as the main influences on his thought, which was further shaped by Čermák’s experience with the First Czechoslovak Republic and the Communist era. Second, I show that the most important category permeating all of his intellectual project is the principle of polarity, combined with the concept of polémos as derived from Greek tragedy. Third, I focus on the consensually anchored value order of society, which is created through an interplay between positive and negative forces. Čermák’s idea that all law must be measured against the value order has deeply influenced the value-based jurisprudence of the Constitutional Court. Finally, I position Čermák’s thought in the context of contemporary political theory, arguing that the contrast with the work of the radical political theorist Chantal Mouffe is particularly illuminating. Even though Čermák and Mouffe share a similar attitude to democracy—in that the primacy of strife renders universal rational consensus impossible—I maintain that Čermák’s theory, due to its emphasis on the categories of good and evil, can be more usefully described as “secular Augustinianism”. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore several versions of the bundle theory and the substratum theory and compare them, with the surprising result that it seems to be true that they are equivalent (in a sense of 'equivalent' to be specified). In order to see whether this is correct or not, I go through several steps : first, I examine different versions of the bundle theory with tropes and compare them to the substratum theory with tropes by going through various standard (...) objections and arguing for a tu quoque in all cases. Emphasizing the theoretical role of the substratum and of the relation of compresence, I defend the claim that these views are equivalent for all theoretical purposes. I then examine two different versions of the bundle theory with universals, and show that one of them is, here again, equivalent to the substratum theory with universals, by examining how both views face the famous objection from Identity of Indiscernibles in a completely parallel way. It is only the second, quite extreme and puzzling, version of the bundle theory with universals that is not be equivalent to any other view; and the diagnosis of why this is so will show just how unpalatable the view is. Similarly, only a not-so-palatable version of the substratum theory is genuinely different from the other views; and here again it's precisely what makes it different that makes it less appealing. (shrink)

This study focuses on explaining the problem of cognition of the world soul through a detailed analysis of passage 37a2–c5 from Plato’s Timaeus. It is divided into three sections, each dedicated to interpreting a different part of the passage. First, the necessary conditions for the soul to be able to cognize correctly are discussed. Second, it is demonstrated that the world soul’s cognition is essentially discursive. It is further argued that the soul makes two different types of declarations that form (...) a single complex inner speech, allowing the soul to cognize both the corporeal and the intelligible. Finally, it is explained how specific cognitive acts arise from the soul’s inner speech. (shrink)

Abstrakt/Abstract Článek pojednává o buddhistické logice a jejím vztahu k logice aristotelské, zejména k principu sporu a principu vyloučeného třetího. Dotkne se také dialetheismu a parakonzistentních logik, které se v souvislosti s interpretacemi buddhismu objevují. The article deals with the Buddhist logic and its relation to Aristotle’s logic, in particular, to the principle of non-contradiction and the principle of exluded middle. It also tackles the topic of dialetheism and paraconsistent logics, which are sometimes mentioned in connection with the interpretations of (...) Buddhism. (shrink)

Dans ce livre sur les photographies, l'auteur defend l'idee que les photographies n'existent pas. En effet, pour le philosophe, la nature des photographies est assez evasive. Quel type d'entites sont-elles? Des objets materiels concrets comme des tirages papier? Des types abstraits qui peuvent etre instanties dans de nombreuses formes tres diverses (tirages, fichiers, images a l'ecran,...)? Nous allons voir qu'aucune categorie metaphysique traditionnelle ne parvient a rendre compte de la nature des photographies, et je soutiendrai alors la these que les (...) photographies n'existent pas. Mais qu'elles existent ou pas, les photographies soulevent un certain nombre de questions philosophiques importantes. En particulier, on peut se demander de quelle maniere une photographie represente le monde et en quoi la representation consiste. Nous allons voir que les photographies ont (ou peuvent avoir) un contenu narratif qui joue un role central dans la maniere dont elles representent. Nous allons egalement aborder le cas particulier de representation de la duree temporelle: une image statique, telle qu'une photographie, comment peut-elle representer un intervalle temporel non-instantane. (shrink)

Ordinary objects are vague, because either (i) composition is restricted, or (ii) there really are no such objects (but we still want to talk about them), or (iii) because such objects are not metaphysically (independently of us) distinguishable from other 'extra-ordinary' objects. In any sense in which there are ordinary objects, they are vague.

Analogy is taken into consideration by its didactive and heuristic functions. Analogic changes are analyzed in the form of syntactic-semantic graphs. Their recognizable structural similarity corresponds to the syntax or semantics in the analogy. The concept of analogy has subjective and objective aspects. The explanation in analogies is a dynamic transition from one concept structure to another. The possibility of analogy in the world is a statement about the disposition of the world. The possibility of analogy asserts something about the (...) behaviour of the environment. Analogy is considered as a means of explanation and a dynamic method of cognition. (shrink)

In early April 1911 Albert Einstein arrived in Prague to become full professor of theoretical physics at the German part of Charles University. It was there, for the first time, that he concentrated primarily on the problem of gravitation. Before he left Prague in July 1912 he had submitted the paper "Relativität und Gravitation: Erwiderung auf eine Bemerkung von M. Abraham" in which he remarkably anticipated what a future theory of gravity should look like. At the occasion of the Einstein-in-Prague (...) centenary an international meeting was organized under a title inspired by Einstein's last paper from the Prague period: "Relativity and Gravitation, 100 Years after Einstein in Prague". The main topics of the conference included: classical relativity, numerical relativity, relativistic astrophysics and cosmology, quantum gravity, experimental aspects of gravitation, and conceptual and historical issues. The conference attracted over 200 scientists from 31 countries, among them a number of leading experts in the field of general relativity and its applications. This volume includes abstracts of the plenary talks and full texts of contributed talks and articles based on the posters presented at the conference. These describe primarily original results of the authors. Full texts of the plenary talks are included in the volume "General Relativity, Cosmology and Astrophysics--Perspectives 100 Years after Einstein in Prague", editions. J. Bičák and T. Ledvinka, published also by Springer Verlag. (shrink)

1. Směry, osobnosti, problémy -- 2. Biograficko-bibliografický slovník.