It has long been recognized that court trials, both criminal and civil, in the common law system, operate around pairs of competing narratives told by opposing advocates. In recent years, however, it has increasingly been argued that narrative flows in many directions and through every form of legal theory and practice. Interest in the part played by metaphor in the law, including metaphors for the law, and for many standard concepts in legal practice, has also been strong, though research (...) under the metaphor banner has been much more fragmentary. In this book, for the first time, a distinguished group of legal scholars, collaborating with specialists from cognitive theory, journalism, rhetoric, social psychology, criminology, and legal activism, explore how narrative and metaphor are both vital to the legal process. Together, they examine topics including concepts of law, legal persuasion, human rights law, gender in the law, innovations in legal thinking, legal activism, creative work around the law, and public debate around crime and punishment. (shrink)

Let me attempt a drastic summary, or symbolic reduction, of Mr. Foss's adeptly metaphorical exposition. The use of the copula is, implicit in the appositive series, will do some violence to the complexity of the argument, but since causes and parts are frowned on by the same argument, the simpler arrangement cannot be altogether out of keeping. In logical and grammatical terms, we have on two sides of a profound ledger: "symbolic reduction," the divisive subject and predicate,--and "metaphoric process," the (...) underlying and unifying energy of the proposition, the subjectum. The negations of dialectic operate to show the insufficiency of symbolic concepts and are the "door to philosophic truth." And in ontological terms, we have on the one hand number, time, space, cause and effect, coincidence and contingency; and on the other the different, the naught, the apeiron, the potential, the tension of process, freedom and necessity in metaphoric lawful unity. There are two closely similar extremes of reduction between which one locates the transcendent philosophy of metaphor: that of sensationalism, the philosophy of the brute and atomic, and that of rationalism, the philosophy of expedient action. And in more or less theological terms, we have on the one hand the environment and its complement the ego, purposive and possessive; on the other, World, the I and the Thou, prayer, sin and grace in the metaphorical unity of consciousness, the widening power of personality in intercession or metaphorical representation. On the one hand, birth and death, past and future, and a present extending ad libitum into either; on the other, the eternal present of the integrated process stretching over past and future, expressed in its purest form in art. And so in aesthetic terms: on the one hand catharsis, a rationalized mixture of the ego's pleasure and pain, asceticism and hedonism, play; on the other, drama--especially tragedy, which par excellence action--Eudaimonia, purification, artistic distance, stylization, imagination, conscience, love. On the one hand, comedy in the sense of farce, environment symbolically reduced, actions and persons according to type, the mechanism of means and ends, rules, rituals, tricks, chance, the caricature of symbolic fixation--producing laughter: on the other hand, true and great comedy, the attempt to understand life in all its contradictions, producing the smile. (shrink)

Languages play an essential role in communicating aesthetic, scientific and religious convictions, as well as laws, worldviews and truths. Additionally, metaphors are an essential part of many languages and artistic expressions. In this paper I will first examine the role metaphors play in religion and art. Is there a specific focus on symbolic and metaphoric language in religion and art? Where are the analogies to be found in artistic metaphors and religious ones? How are differences to be described? How do (...) various concepts of aesthetics and theological concepts explain those different kinds of language and how, if at all, do they make use of them? Lastly: what could be added to aesthetics, philosophy and theology by examining carefully the role and importance of language, including nonverbal, sign language and especially metaphorical language? Without the human capacity for language, religions are scarcely imaginable. A widening of traditional exegesis and hermeneutics by taking into account nonverbal semantics is needed. Religion is a cognitive and linguistic phenomenon. By taking this seriously, we set and enable an agenda to discuss religion scientifically, leaving aside for the purpose of a scientific understanding and discourse about the inter-religious and the inner-religious claims of truth and absolutist claims. To sum it up: metaphor is introduced as an important means of language when it comes to religious conceptualization. Next, I will show that art, more than religion, deals with visual metaphor – the latter being an image that suggests a particular association, similarity or analogy between two generally unconnected visual elements. This often, but not always, functions in a roughly comparable fashion to the better-known concept of verbal metaphor. In addition, visual metaphor has developed many original and unique characteristics. These two sections are followed by another one dealing with cultural philosophy of religion and aesthetics, as well as the meaning of metaphors for these disciplines. The next section is on metaphor and metaphorical language in mathematics, natural sciences and art and how they are related, i.e. influence and help each other. I will discuss the critical approach to metaphors in natural science and provide a short introduction to the cultural history of mathematics and art. Mathematicians and artists have long been on the quest to understand the physical world they see before them and the abstract objects they know by thought alone. How have art and mathematics helped each other in representing each other’s concepts? A final section provides a summary and an outlook: theology is contextual as is science – and so is art. All these disciplines partly rely upon metaphor and by the help of metaphor get closer to an intercultural and interdisciplinary understanding. I shall argue that, by dealing more carefully with their metaphorical language and their own metaphors, together they become better equipped to map the world. (shrink)

Human rights discourse has been likened to a global lingua franca, and in more ways than one, the analogy seems apt. Human rights discourse is a language that is used by all yet belongs uniquely to no particular place. It crosses not only the borders between nation-states, but also the divide between national law and international law: it appears in national constitutions and international treaties alike. But is it possible to conceive of human rights as a global language or lingua (...) franca not just in a figurative or metaphorical sense, but in a literal or linguistic sense as a legal dialect defined by distinctive patterns of word choice and usage? Does there exist a global language of human rights that transcends not only national borders, but also the divide between domestic and international law? Empirical analysis suggests that the answer is yes, but this global language comes in at least two variants or dialects. New techniques for performing automated content analysis enable us to analyze the bulk of all national constitutions over the last two centuries, together with the world’s leading regional and international human rights instruments, for patterns of linguistic similarity and to evaluate how much language, if any, they share in common. Specifically, we employ a technique known as topic modeling that disassembles texts into recurring verbal patterns. The results highlight the existence of two species or dialects of rights talk—the universalist dialect and the positive-rights dialect—both of which are global in reach and rising in popularity. The universalist dialect is generic in content and draws heavily on the type of language found in international and regional human rights instruments. It appears in particularly large doses in the constitutions of transitional states, developing states, and states that have been heavily exposed to the influence of the international community. The positive-rights dialect, by contrast, is characterized by its substantive emphasis on positive rights of a social or economic variety, and by its prevalence in lengthier constitutions and constitutions from outside the common law world, especially those of the Spanish-speaking world. Both dialects of rights talk are truly transnational, in the sense that they appear simultaneously in national, regional, and international legal instruments and transcend the distinction between domestic and international law. Their existence attests to the blurring of the boundary between constitutional law and international law. (shrink)

This essay looks at the concept of AKEDAH, the essence of which is the travail of the human condition and the trust in vindication and victory, as a salient and deep metaphor for bioethics. The author first delineates the symbol, then shows its theological and ethical significance, and finally suggests its bioethical applications.The LORD said, “Go get Isaac, your only son, the one you dearly love! Take him to the land of Moriah, and I will show you a mountain (...) where you must sacrifice him to me on the fires of an altar.” So Abraham got up early the next morning and chopped wood for the fire. He put a saddle on his donkey and left with Isaac and two servants for the place where God had told him to go.Genesis 22There is silence all around. The Baptist appears, and cries: “Repent, for the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” Soon after that comes Jesus, and in the knowledge that He is the coming Son of Man lays hold of the wheel of the world to set it moving on that last revolution which is to bring all ordinary history to a close. It refuses to turn, and He throws Himself upon it. Then it does turn; and crushes Him. The wheel rolls onward, and the mangled body of the one immeasurably great Man, who was strong enough to think of Himself as the spiritual ruler of mankind and to bend history to His purpose, is hanging upon it still. That is His victory and His reign. (shrink)

The article debates the problems of metaphors in the philosophy of Immanuel Kant. The most important four Kantian metaphors analyzed here are: the Copernican revolution, the island of truth and the stormy ocean of illusion, the starry heavens and the moral law, and the vision of perpetual peace. Besides the extensive analysis of these four metaphors and of some criticism directed towards some of the core problems of Kantianism, these pages try to answer to the question if Kant‟s metaphors are (...) still capable of stimulating our systematic thinking. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche, Biology and MetaphorBabette E. BabichGregory Moore. Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Pp. viii + 228. Cloth, $55.00.Gregory Moore's Nietzsche, Biology and Metaphor is a well-written book on a topic of growing importance in Nietzsche studies. Not only concerned with offering an interpretation of Nietzsche in terms of biology and metaphor, Moore's approach offers a literary contextualization of Darwinism in (...) the history of ideas but also in terms of an important reflection on the idea of decadence so important to Nietzsche and so influential in theorizing public health and law in the twentieth century, most perniciously in its deadly expressions in Nazi propaganda. Moore is thus able to bridge the fields of the more specifically linguistic study of metaphor and source-scholarship. To Moore's great credit, he seeks to emphasize the extent to which Nietzsche's thought was developed in active correspondence with the scientific literature and debates of his age. But this reviewer thinks it important to warn those with classical or traditional interest in metaphor that the text presupposes that the reader (and this is also to say that Moore) knows a Nietzschean metaphor when he sees one.Moore begins with the question of Nietzsche's Darwinism, focusing on the physiology of power to explore the relations between Darwin, Spencer, Lamarck, and Rolph, but also Nietzsche's favorites, Malthus and Lange, etc. The discussion of the history of the reception of Darwin's ideas is careful and extensive and offers an insightful clarification of Darwin (necessary to distinguish Darwin from Darwinism, "social" and otherwise). Some readers will find it even more Anglophone than seems justified by Darwin's heritage, despite Moore's passing references to Cuvier and (at rather greater length) Haeckel and Roux.This reviewer notes that the latter references have been well-discussed in the German literature and to some great part Moore is fair to this tradition even if it is also true that the discussion never enters the level of the history of science as this reader, for one, might have wished. In the case of Moore's interpretation of Nietzsche's texts, the readings sometimes suggest a reprise of what has come to be the consensus (and not just among Nietzsche scholars) of views on Nietzsche's thinking. Thus where certain secondary authors are in force in Moore's well-documented account (Pick, Moles, and Ruse), others are missing. Indeed, in the case of Nietzsche and Darwinism, Frederick Gregory's Nature Lost? Natural Science and the German Theological Traditions of the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge, 1992) offers an important supplement. Another book that seems to have been overlooked is Timothy Lenoir, The Strategy of Life: Teleology and Mechanics in Nineteenth Century German Biology (Dordrecht, 1982), and those interested in von Baer and other proponents of teleology in biology will find Lenoir's broader account useful.The second half of the book addresses degeneration and like most contemporary discussions, Moore's book is charged with the political history of the last century. Moore reviews the association of decadence with jazz music and—via physiognomy as its external signifier—to the ugly, the Jew, the Black, and, of course, to women who broke with the family role. As an instantiation, Moore uncovers the nineteenth century antipathy to "allegedly aberrant behavior such as masturbation and homosexuality" in Nietzsche's "restrictive" [End Page 348] (133) view of sexuality and precocious eroticism (134) as degeneration. However, the issue of masturbation is complicated. The nineteenth-century perspective on masturbation was less a matter of prudishness than a judgment backed with considerable social and medical force, which equated the practice with sickness or criminality, the counterpart to which today would be our judgment with regard to an addiction to cocaine or heroine. This censure drove Wagner's "exposure" of Nietzsche's personal dependence on this practice. Readers interested in this question can either take themselves to the easy-to-find because eponymous chapter in Marc Wiener's Richard Wagner and the Anti-Semitic Imagination (Lincoln, 1995) or to David B. Allison's account of this as the occasion for the break between Nietzsche and Wagner in Reading... (shrink)

Let (leeway) incompatibilism be the thesis that causal determinism is incompatible with the freedom to do otherwise. Several prominent authors have claimed that incompatibilism alone can capture, or at least best captures, the intuitive appeal behind Jorge Luis Borges's famous “Garden of Forking Paths” metaphor. The thought, briefly, is this: the “single path” leading up to one's present decision represents the past; the forking paths that one must decide between represent those possible futures consistent with the past and the (...) laws of nature. But if determinism is true, there is only one possible future consistent with the past and the laws and, hence, only one path to choose from. That is, if determinism is true, then we are not free to do otherwise. In this paper, I argue that this understanding of the Garden of Forking Paths faces a number of problems and ought to be rejected even by incompatibilists. I then present an alternative understanding that not only avoids these problems but still supports incompatibilism. Finally, I consider how various versions of (leeway) compatibilism fit with the Garden of Forking Paths as well as the broader question of whether metaphors, however intuitive, have any dialectical force in the debates over freedom. (shrink)

The concepts of ḥaqīqah (literal meaning) and majāz (figurative mea-ning), which are central to the Arabic science of balagah (rhetoric), play a crucial role in the interpretation and understanding of the Qur'an. These terms have been examined in various disciplines such as language, Islamic jurisprudence (uṣūl al-fiqh), and theology (kalām), and over time, scholars have developed distinct interpretations of these concepts. One of the key debates in early Islamic thought revolves around whether certain Qur'anic verses—those whose apparent meanings defy rational (...) explanation—should be understood literally or figuratively. An important example of this debate is found in Surah al-Baqarah (2/74), where the verse describes "stones that roll down from fear of God." The notion of stones moving due to fear of God raised significant theological and ontological discussions among scholars from the earliest periods of Islam. This article aims to explore the various approaches taken by early Islamic exegetes and theologians concerning Su-rah al-Baqarah 2/74, examining how this verse has been interpreted both linguistically and theologically. The study will analyze the figurative interp-retation of Muʿtazilah theologians such as Jāhiz and Abu ʿAlī al- Jubbāī, who based their views on theories of nature (tabī‘ah), as well as the literalist app-roaches of classical exegetes such as Tabarī, Māturīdī, and Bāqillānī. Additio-nally, the work of linguists like Ibn Jinnī, who utilized the literary technique of metonymy (majaz mursal), and Bāqillānī focus on implied metaphor (isti'ārah makniyyah), will be critically examined to understand how these interpreta-tive strategies reflect broader linguistic theories. By contextualizing these interpretations, this study seeks to shed light on how the perception of ḥaqīqah and majāz evolved in early Arabic rhetoric and how these concepts influenced Qur'anic exegesis. Moreover, the broader implications of these debates for Islamic thought in fields such as theology, law, and the science of language will be analyzed, demonstrating the intricate role of language in shaping Qur'anic interpretation. (shrink)

This article explores the manner in which politico-legal language makes use of metaphors of violence and destruction in order to describe state/legal functions and actions. It argues that although such use of a militaristic hyperbole is generally regarded as normal and appropriate, it is in fact harmful in the way that it presents complex and specific problems as being simple and abstract. From a semiotic point of view, and using the work of Roland Barthes, law is regarded as a system (...) of signs and ‘combative’ legal language can be seen as ideological manipulation through the technique of so-called second-level signification (myth). Although it is conceded that law, similar to all other interpretive systems, cannot avoid the use of metaphoric language, it is argued that we should resist regarding legal language as neutral and ‘natural’ and that we should rather retain the memory of legal concepts and categories as historical, man-made, and therefore always open to revision. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Nietzsche and MetaphorKarsten HarriesNietzsche and Metaphor, by Sarah Kofman; translated by Duncan Large; xivi & 239 pp. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993, $37.50 cloth, $12.95 paper.Since its first publication in 1972, Sarah Kofman’s Nietzsche et la métaphore has become a minor classic; reason enough to welcome this readable translation, accompanied with the translator’s unusually informative introduction, which resituates the work “in the context in which it first (...) appeared, at the high-water mark during an extraordinary surge of interest in ‘the new Nietzsche’ which swept over France in the 1960s and early 1970s” (p. ix), and concludes with a brief glance at the similarly extraordinary growth of interest in Nietzsche today in the English speaking countries, which should assure this translation of a warm reception. The addition of thoughtful notes and a complete bibliography of Kofman’s writings reinforces the impression that a major work of a major writer has finally been made available in English.Indeed, anyone interested in the metaphor-intoxicated, “new Nietzsche,” will be required to turn to this book, which has made such an important contribution to the discourse that constructed this Nietzsche. Rather short (without Kofman’s appended review of Granier’s Heideggerian Nietzsche, just 119 pp.) and readable, it invites us to confront this “new Nietzsche” with Nietzsche himself, or rather with the texts he published and—here we must be on our guard—with texts that for different reasons he left unpublished.The way this book gives precedence to the unpublished over the published works invites challenge, and here again it is not The Will to Power, but rather early material that comes in for intense scrutiny where, by now quite expectedly, “The Philosopher: Reflections on the Struggle Between Art and Knowledge” and even more “On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense,” come in for special attention—chapter 3, “The Forgetting of Metaphor,” and chapter 4, which bears the title “Metaphorical Architectures,” offer themselves as a partial commentary on the latter brief and never completed text. But still only a partial commentary, and as revealing as the passages Kofman chooses to discuss are those passed over. As expected one meets with Nietzsche’s famous description of truth as “A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, and anthropomorphisms” (p. 58) and a great many related passages, pointing in the same general direction. But we should not allow ourselves to be carried away by the flow of Nietzsche’s youthful prose: only a one-sided reading of this text will overlook how close, despite his use of architectural metaphors to call into question the architecture of philosophy, Nietzsche here remains to one of the paradigmatic philosophical builders, to Kant, and even more to Schopenhauer—both mentioned only in passing by Kofman. That we ourselves have constituted the world of science is for Nietzsche no reason to question “the eternal consistency, omnipresence, and infallibility of the laws of nature” (“On Truth and Lie in a Nonmoral Sense”). Quite the opposite, he goes on, the [End Page 153] turn to the subject allowed a thinker like Kant to conclude that, in Nietzsche’s words, “so far as we can penetrate here—from the telescopic heights to the microscopic depths—everything is secure, complete, infinite, regular, and without any gaps. Science will be able to dig successfully in this shaft forever, and all the things that are discovered will harmonize with and not contradict each other.” Nietzsche advances no considerations to dispute such confidence. Readers of this text focused on the many ways in which Nietzsche here emphasizes “the artistic process of metaphor formation” should keep in mind his insistence that this process, with which every sensation is said to begin, is also said to presuppose Kant’s pure intuitions, time and space, and therefore “relationships of succession and number.” “The only way in which the possibility of subsequently constructing a new conceptual edifice from metaphors themselves can be explained is by the firm persistence of these original forms. That is to say, this conceptual edifice is an imitation of temporal, spatial, and numerical relationships in the domain of metaphor. Every explanation of metaphor formation is here said to... (shrink)

Cyberspace, a term popularized in the 1984 novel Neuromancer, was used by William Gibson to describe the ‘consensual hallucination’ and interstitial online world that lies between the reality of our world and that of the surreal terrain of dreamscapes. While many attempts have been made to describe this intangible, yet seemingly perceptible space, the digital domain as a metaphor mirrors in many ways our own inadequate understanding of consciousness. Conversely, the physicist Michio Kaku explains that our reality is bounded (...) by hyperspace – a multi-dimensioned space beyond our quotidian 3D existence that runs parallel, or tangential, to us along with the phenomenon of time. Indeed, if space and time (here considered as space–time) are a consolidated whole in the physical sense, perhaps our consciousness, as a structure manifest within this continuum may itself be thought of as a sensorial projection of this amalgam that attempts to observe and make sense, or meaning, of this condition. In truth, what if our need and delight in storytelling is driven by the evolution of our biology, as well as our impulse to locate our place in the universe? This article will attempt to examine and delimit the narrative confines of space–time as an appeal to, and an endeavour at, uncovering the alterity of storytelling as a function of consciousness. It will visit the realms of the holograph, quantum mechanics, virtual and augmented realities, as well as other scientific and philosophical tracts as a means to investigate and explore the physiology of space and our imperative desire to share stories. (shrink)

Existe-t-il véritablement, du point de vue cognitif et épistémologique, une distance insurmontable entre grandes et petites mythologies, entre les récits fondateurs sur lesquels reposent nos références culturelles et littéraires et toutes ces métaphores qui façonnent et orientent en profondeur nos expressions langagières et les objets qui nous entourent et qui, elles aussi, racontent une histoire? Si aucune société ne peut vivre sans mythes, nul ne saurait vivre ni signifier sans métaphore. Et si Œdipe ou Philoctète sont des signifiants lourds de (...) sens capables de générer une pléiade de configurations poétiques sans cesse renouvelées, Levi’s, Coca-Cola ou Apple ne sont pas moins, bien qu’à une dimension et à un degré différent, des noms qui se sont progressivement érigés au statut de mythes contemporains grâce à une habile stratégie où image et récit fondateur se renforcent et se légitiment réciproquement. En tant que force qui harmonise l’ordre et le désordre, le chaos et le cosmos, la symétrie et la dissymétrie, la Loi et la dimension de la fête et du jeu, Apollon et Dionysos, la vie intérieure et l’expérience du monde ; bref, en tant que principe médiateur et réunificateur de l’univers, de la forme et du sens, la métaphore est ainsi l’un des noms possibles de l’imaginaire. L’autre nom, c’est évidemment l’Amour. En effet, du Moyen Âge à l’époque contemporaine, l’amour, en tant que construction à partir d’une image-écran médiatrice, est toujours une quête du sens, un acte de signification, c’est-à-dire un processus dynamique mettant en relation les éléments disjoints du monde et de notre expérience. From a cognitive and epistemological perspective, does an insurmountable distance really exist between big and small mythologies, between founding narratives on which our cultural and literary references are based, all of the metaphors that fashion and orient the depth of our linguistic expression, and the objects that surround us, which, in their own way, tell a story? A society cannot live without myths; nor would one know how to live or to signify without metaphors. If Oedipus or Philoctetus are heavily loaded with meaning and capable of generating a constellation of constantly renewing poetic configurations, Levi’s, Coca-Cola or Apple do no less. Despite being at a different dimension and degree, these names have been progressively built up to the status of contemporary myths by way of a clever strategy in which image and founding story provide reciprocal reinforcement and legitimization. As a harmonizing force of order and disorder, of chaos and cosmos, of symmetry and asymmetry, of the Law and the dimension of party and play, of Apollo and Dionysus, of interior life and the experience of the world, in short, as a mediating and reunifying principle of the universe, of form, and of meaning, metaphor is one possible name for the imaginary. Its other name is, obviously, Love. In fact, from the Middle Ages to contemporary times, love, as a construction growing forth from a mediating image-screen, has always been a quest for meaning, an act of signification, a dynamic process connecting the fractal elements of our world and of our experience. (shrink)

Jacques Derrida offers his recent commentary on the early career of Paul de Man as an urgent intervention in a discussion he fears is going awry. The most pressing danger he sees in the recent revelations is that they have played into the hands of de Man’s antagonists, who are now ready to denounce the whole of his career and even deconstruction itself. Against such indiscriminate critiques Derrida hurls the epithet: totalitarian. He is attempting to reseize the initiative in the (...) discussion and to reset the terms of the debate. His agenda extends across historical, theoretical, and political questions.He wants to affirm that a radical, indeed absolute break separates the later from the earlier de Man. He also wants to show that the young de man, however firmly committed to fascist ideology and however much an accomplice of the Nazis occupying Belgium, at the same time regularly distanced himself from that ideology and even undermined its meanings. Moreover, Derrida boldly takes up the challenge that these revelations have cast on the intellectual movement he and de Man have shaped. Can deconstruction come to grips with the political and intellectual history of its own leading American proponent? And can deconstruction in the process make a distinctive contribution to the understanding of fascism and intellectuals’ participation in it? John Brenkman is associate professor of English at Northwestern University. He is the author of Culture and Domination . Jules David Law is assistant professor of English at Northwestern University. He is currently working on a book-length study of the metaphors of surface, depth, and reflection in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British prose. (shrink)

Cicero’s first criminal speech, Pro Roscio Amerino, gained acquittal for his client but also presented Cicero himself as an advocate of legality at a time of great political turmoil and uncertainty. He emphasizes the importance of good-faith contracts to the maintenance of civil society, while demonstrating that his opponents have abused the contracts of societas and mandatum in persecuting Roscius. Cicero’s positive model is his teacher Scaevola—murdered during the civil war and advocate of good-faith contracts and of the broader ideal (...) of vitae societas, a metaphorical contract that embodies the values of civil society which Cicero shares. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 23, Issue 2, pp 127 - 160 This article illuminates rabbinic concepts of temporality through examining metaphorical uses of the root qbʿ. The root has both concrete and metaphorical meanings, describing the physical attachment of objects as well as temporal ideas of permanence, stability, and endurance. While it has been argued that rabbinic texts do not display concepts of time in the modern sense, a combination of philological and conceptual analysis shows how rabbinic images of temporal themes (...) can be elicited from rabbinic texts. Moreover, attention to the multivalence of words can clarify complex Bavli passages that engage overlapping but distinctive metaphorical meanings of the root. (shrink)

Metaphors of nature and organism play a central role in the epistemes of the Western culture and arts. The entire project of the 'modern' meant a separation of man from the cosmos and its laws. Signs and symbols are thought to be arbitrary and conventional social constructions. However, there are many returns to iconic imitations of nature and biological principles also in such an esoteric art as music. One of the highest aesthetic categories in Western art music is the so-called (...) 'organic growth' which particularly manifests in symphony. The concepts of 'organic/inorganic' can be used as analytic terms, whereby one might even compare such composers as Jean Sibelius and Gustav Mahler. Music is said to be 'organic' when (I) its theme actors live in their proper Umwelt (or isotopy); (2) all music material stems from the same themes (it is innerly iconic); (3) all musical events follow each other coherently (inner indexicality or the principle of Growth); (4) music strives for some goal (temporality). Moreover the Ueküll idea of a particular lch-Ton of every organism can be turned back to music. Hence we can say that every musical piece is like an 'organism' which has its lch-Ton detennining which signs it accepts and how it acts in the musical environmentof its own and formed by other musical works. (shrink)

In many papers dealing with the stylistic features of legal texts, metaphor is highlighted as a stylistic figure often used in the language of law. On a daily basis we can witness the frequent use of metaphoric collocations like soft laws, hard laws, silent partner, hedge funds, etc. In this paper, the author analyses the use of denotations for colours as constituent parts of metaphoric collocations in the language of law. The analysis is conducted by using a comparative approach (...) to examples extracted by means of computer technology from international bills and conventions available online. In the main part of the paper, examples are classified by using a colour denotation as the main criterion for the classification. After that, the examples are compared with corresponding expressions used in German and Croatian. Taking into account the main principle of the Skopos translation theory that differences between cultures strongly influence the translation process, the hypothesis of this research is that in many cases there will be no lexical equivalence between collocations with colour denotation in three languages. Due to the fact that international bills and conventions build the corpus of the research, and that the English language has become the lingua franca of international communication, it can be expected that some metaphoric terms and collocations would be literally translated from English. Conclusions drawn from the comparative analysis of legal collocations containing denotations for colours can be interesting to lawyers and LSP teachers in the field of law. In this sense, results of the research can contribute to motivational aspects of teaching Legal English and Legal German. (shrink)

There are two main senses of ‘mechanism’, both deriving from the metaphor of nature as a machine. One sense refers to contrivance or design, as in ‘the plant’s mechanism of attracting butterflies’. The other sense refers to cause or law process, as in ‘the mechanism of heredity’. In his work on evolution, Charles Darwin showed that organisms are produced by a mechanism in the second sense, although he never used this language. He also discussed contrivance, where he did use (...) the language of mechanism. This discussion relates metaphor in general and Darwin’s use of the machine metaphor in particular to the problem of the nature of science, concluding that one use of the metaphor reinforces the objective nature of science and the other use reinforces the subjective nature of science. (shrink)

Historians of science have long considered the very idea of a law-governed universe to be the relic of a bygone intellectual culture that took it largely for granted that a divine lawmaker existed. Similarly, many philosophers of science today insist that the notion of a law of nature is fraught with implausibly theological assumptions, preferring instead to treat them as theoretical axioms in an optimal description of nature's regularities, or else as robust patterns of causal connections or causal powers whose (...) status can be reconciled to the stringent demands of metaphysical naturalism. Yet the metaphor of lawhood has proven more difficult to dislodge than the theistic commitments it once presupposed, not least because it preserves the widespread intuition that the task of scientific inquiry is not to stipulate the difference between a lawful and an accidental regularity in nature, but to discover it. Taking its cue from the repeated failure to find naturalistic alternatives to divine lawmaking, this book undertakes a retrieval and reappraisal of a high-scholastic philosophy of nature that grounds lawlike regularities in the conceptual and causal powers of God and, having done so, concludes that the metaphysical framework of classical theism yields a more powerful and parsimonious explanation of the rhythms and patterns of the natural world than its secular rivals. (shrink)

The law in England allows that both parents and competent minors concurrently have the right to consent to medical treatment of the minor. This means that while competent minors may consent to treatment their refusal of consent does not act as an effective veto of treatment and treatment remains lawful if given with parental consent. This approach has been heavily criticized as inconsistent with the House of Lords decision in the Gillick case and damned as ‘palpable nonsense’. In this article, (...) I examine these criticisms and conclude that, far from being illogical, it is entirely consistent with the essential asymmetry between consent to treatment and refusal of treatment. I examine the two metaphors of keyholders and flak jackets used to explain this approach and I suggest that both have value but only when used in combination. I also explain why, contrary to the criticism, it is consistent with Gillick. (shrink)

Two prominent metaphors in Greek and Roman political philosophy are surveyed here, with a view to determining their possible meanings and the plausibility of the claims advanced by those possible meanings.

From US Supreme Court Justice Louis Brandeis’s 1933 judgement in Louis K Liggett Co v Lee to Matt Wuerker’s satirical cartoon “Corpenstein”, the use of Frankenstein’s monster as a metaphor for the modern corporation has been a common practice. This paper seeks to unpack and extend explicitly this metaphorical register via a recent filmic and graphic interpretation of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein myth. Whilst Frankenstein has been read as an allegorical critique of rights—Victor Frankenstein’s creation of a monstrous body, reflecting (...) the figurative construction of a body by rights discourse—the metaphoric notion of reanimating a ‘soulless corpse’ resonates with Edward’s Thurlow’s description of the corporation as having ‘no soul to damn’. By exploring the figurative and optical representations of this process of reanimating the body in Scott Beattie’s film I, Frankenstein and Kevin Grevioux’s companion graphic novel I, Frankenstein: Genesis, I would like to extend this metaphoric register, by examining the theological origin and nature of the corporate form. This theology is explicitly referenced in the film and graphic novel via the battle between Gargoyles and Demons, which dominates the plot and backstory. The role of Frankenstein’s monster—now called Adam—however, is about enabling the reanimation of thousands of corpses without souls for possession by the demon hoard headed by Prince Naberius, who in his alternative persona Charles Wessex, controls the Wessex Institute and Wessex Industries. This ‘corporate baron’ himself has devoted his ‘life’ to enabling the rediscovery of Frankenstein’s ability to reanimate the dead for the purposes of gaining immortality. This mythic framing, however, renders explicitly visible the nature and purpose of the corporate form itself—of capturing and reanimating life in a form of immortality via the mechanisms of perpetual succession. This visual rendering, of a metaphoric framing goes to show the way in which the optical nature of the dominant forms of popular culture—film, television, comic books—provide a means for seeing law’s metaphorical images and for thus unpacking, interrogating and rendering them anew. It argues for a shift from the image of the corporation as a monstrous body to one which involves relations of reciprocity, gratuitousness and gift. (shrink)

Recent studies of conceptual metaphors in a legal context have often dealt with the power of embodiment. However, the connotations of culturally originated metaphors could be different when they appear in laws and regulations. In particular, the role of metaphor when the legislator wishes to define intention in hybrid organizations is investigated here. The case studied is how a conceptual metaphor of ‘business’ manifesting itself in the Swedish simile adjective affärsmässig has spread over 40 years. ‘Business’ early on (...) acquired connotations such as impartiality and methodical approach, and can be used metaphorically. Introduced in the regulation of public procurement, ‘businesslike’ was later used to regulate conflicts of interest, restrict state aid and also entered tax legislation. Analysis of Swedish court decisions where ‘businesslike’ occurs shows how the emphasis has shifted from public sector efficiency to neo-liberal principles of competition, while stronger social norms related to environmental effects have led to the term being removed from the Public Procurement Act. Elements of a mixed jurisdiction arise from reliance on EU case-law, and national use of ambiguous cultural metaphors in legal texts and court decisions is a plausible response. (shrink)

Name der Zeitschrift: Semiotica Jahrgang: 2016 Heft: 209 Seiten: 357-370.

This paper constitutes a critical exploration of the functional features underpinning the unconscious of institutional attachment—namely an attachment which is understood in terms of the subject-infant’s love for his institutional parent-power holder, and the indefinite need for a subject to remain within its infantile condition under the parenthood of the State. We venture beyond the Paternal metaphor and move towards the neglected metaphor of the Mother, so focal in the individual process of identification, assumption of language and the (...) permanent attachment to the space of prohibition and Law. A new position in Language is defined. To understand how the psychic space of the infant is artfully subjugated in the making of the Western culture and domination of the Western system of legal interpretation, an enquiry into the legal emblematic history of representations is necessary to map the process through which the subject learns its legal self and relationship with otherness through what Pierre Legendre coined as the Occidental Mirror and the triangular logic of reflexivity. A final enquiry interrogates the way the legal institution places itself in the position of the specular image that captivates the subject-infant within a procreated legal order, a law-giving and law abiding life starting from the laws of the familial structure reinforced by the role of the parents and by analogy, by the State assuming that role in the institutional life of the ad infinitum infant. (shrink)

Work on the relation between figurative language and the law is a fairly recent trend, within legal discourse studies, linguistics, and semiotics. The work in conceptual metaphor theory, for example, is starting to unpack the underlying metaphorical and metonymic structure of legal language, producing some new and important insights into the nature of this language. Missing from this emerging line of inquiry are the views of the Neapolitan philosopher Giambattista Vico, who was the first to understand the power of (...) figurative language in the creation of symbolic systems, like language and the law. His tripartite evolutionary model of language shows that there is not one language of the law, but three “languages.” By integrating Vico’s model with the work in conceptual metaphor theory it will be possible to penetrate the underlying conceptual structure of legal discourse and thus lead to a more insightful science of this discourse. (shrink)

This study examines the processes ofdecision-making used by intensive care(critical care) specialists. Ninety-ninespecialists completed a questionnaire involvingthree clinical cases, using a novel methodologyinvestigating the role of uncertainty andtemporal-related factors, and exploring a rangeof ethical issues. Validation and triangulationof the results was done via a comparison studywith a medically lay, but highly informed groupof 37 law students. For both study groups,constructing reasons for a decision was largelyan interpretative and imaginative exercise thatwent beyond the data (as presented), commonlyresulting in different reasons supporting (...) thesame conclusions and similar reasons supportingopposite conclusions. The skills of ethicalimagination and interpretation were related toan individual''s prior lived experience,construed in the broadest sense. Application ofthese skills of ethical imagination andinterpretation always occurred, to some degree,in a state of uncertainty and almost alwaysinvolved temporal relationships.Using these results, a theory of ethicaldecision-making is proffered. Three levels ortypes of reasoning processes may be present.Type I decision-making involves the applicationof rules, usually in a deductive fashion. TypeII decision-making is characterised by aprocess where a plurality of reasons arebalanced, weighed and sifted with each other.Type III decision-making is intimately linkedwith respondents lived experiences and `crafts''the content of type I and II reasoningprocesses, via the application of ethicalimagination and interpretation. Relationshipsbetween these three types of reasoningprocesses, and with narrative ethics, are alsodiscussed. (shrink)

Since the seventeenth century, our understanding of the natural world has been one of phenomena that behave in accordance with natural laws. While other elements of the early modern scientific worldview may be rejected or at least held in question—the metaphor of the world as a great machine, the narrowly mechanist assumption that all physical interactions must be contact interactions, the idea that matter might actually be obeying rules laid down by its Divine Author – the notion of natural (...) law has continued to play a pivotal role in actual scientific practice, in our philosophical interpretations of science, and in their its metaphysical implications. (shrink)

In recent years restitution scholars have expended considerable energy in attempting to reveal the logical structure of the law of proprietary remedies. That project advances on the assumption that the strange rhetoric that pervades this area of law can be stripped away to reveal restitutionary principles. However, the doctrines in question have proved resistant to such endeavors. An appreciation of why this is so requires recognition of the very real anxiety generated by the judicial readjustment of property rights that takes (...) place in this area of law. The use of metaphors, fictions and evidential presumptions that characterizes the law tracing, subrogation and the provision of proprietary relief for wrongs serves to assuage this anxiety by manufacturing the appearance that these remedies are perfectly conventional instances of the enforcement of pre-existing property or consensual transfers of property. However, these property rites have a logic of their own - a logic that influences and constrains the development of the law of proprietary remedies and makes it impossible to neatly reduce this field to a set of restitutionary principles. This is illustrated by the work of Professor Peter Birks, which represents the most comprehensive attempt to cut away the abstruse rhetoric found in this area and reveal the restitutionary substructure of the law of proprietary remedies and makes it impossible to neatly reduce this field to a set of restitutionary principles. This is illustrated by the work of Professor Peter Birks, which represents the most comprehensive attempt to cut away the substructure of the law of proprietary remedies. In Birks' work this process has merely resulted in old metaphors being replaced with new ones. Ultimately, we must accept that if re are to rationalize this area we must be prepared to engage directly with the policy issues that arise in this context. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 33.2 (2000) 137-153 [Access article in PDF] Metaphor and the Making of Sense: The Contemporary Metaphor Renaissance William Franke Metaphor has gained a new lease on life through the revival of rhetoric in recent decades. For promoters of "la nouvelle rhétorique," such as Gérard Genette and Roland Barthes, rhetoric came to coincide with a total science of language that is practically coextensive with (...) all social and human knowledge, while in the Anglo-Saxon world, Wayne Booth, in the wake of Kenneth Burke, repristinated rhetoric as, not just a technical discipline, but a moral one, and, in fact, an all-embracing criticism of the humanities. 1 The fortunes of metaphor have revived and flourished in tandem with those of rhetoric as a whole. Over the more than two millennia of a progressive eclipse of rhetoric, during which it shrank from its original primacy as the master art of persuasion in law, literature, and politics and, moreover, as the general framework of culture, to the status of an ancillary art of elocution of exclusively formal import, metaphor was eventually confined to being just one particular instance within the schemes of classifications of tropes. It became an affair of style, an ornament of decorative discourse, as rhetoric came to be identified with mere elocutio and was no longer essentially also inventio--the finding of arguments, in which metaphor's role is actually paramount--and dispositio--the ordering of discourse into its syntactic parts, such as exordium, narration, discussion, peroration. As the originally tripartite art and science of rhetoric was amputated of two of its main divisions in the classical model established on the basis of Aristotle's three-book treatise, 2 metaphor became a merely formal enhancement and lost its roles as substantive and structuring for knowledge and discourse.The decline of interest in philosophical, Aristotelian rhetoric had much to do with metaphor's reduction to a merely technical or decorative device. But with the recent widening practically without limit of the terrain of rhetoric, and particularly with its restoration to its original standing as a philosophical discipline comprehending the substance of argument, metaphor [End Page 137] has once again acquired cognitive status and, moreover, has tended to become the name for figurative language in general and even, emblematically, for the rhetorical or rhetoricity as such. Where the power of rhetoric to reshape cognitive meaning and even to reinvent, or at least reconfigure, reality was once again recognized as irresistible throughout all the realms of discourse, the source and unity of this power seemed to require a name, and more often than not metaphor--on account of the transformative, inventive power associated particularly with it--has been adopted to serve this purpose.Today, under the aegis of metaphor, the power of figurative language, arguably the originating power at the source of all language and even of an articulated world as such, has newly become an object of research and general theoretical speculation. This extension of the concept of metaphor is bound up with a renewed view of figurative language in general as not only a substantive bearer of the content of discourse, but also as ontologically constitutive of the world, as operative at the origins of things and their identities. It has become possible to view all language as being metaphorical, and accordingly metaphorical operations of transfer and redefinition have been recognized as being the very essence of language and of all that comes to articulation through it. Furthermore, as witnessed by burgeoning publications and conferences, metaphor has become a topic onto which practically all the classic philosophical problems of ontology and epistemology are projected and appear in a new, specifically linguistic, light. 3This new ascendency of metaphor is certainly not uninflected or uncontested, even within the camps of the new rhetoricians. Genette, in "La rhétorique restreinte" (1972), resists the "inflation of metaphor" to become the trope of tropes and the figure of figures in a wide range of writers epitomizing modern poetics--particularly Marcel Proust, Roman Jakobson, and Michel Deguy (1969). Genette argues against reduction of... (shrink)

Synthetic biology is an emerging technology that aims to design and engineer DNA and molecular structures of single cell organisms. Existing organisms can be altered, novel organisms can be created. In doing so, synthetic biology makes use of specific technoscientific understandings of living beings. This volume sets out to explore and assess synthetic biology and its notions of life from philosophical, ethical, social, and legal perspectives. Contents Concepts, Metaphors, Worldviews.- Public Good and Private Ownership.Social and Legal Ramifications.- Opportunities, Risks, Governance. (...) Target Groups Scholars of sociology, philosophy, theory of science, history of science, biology, engineering Politicians and policymakers The Editor Dr. Joachim Boldt is Deputy Director at the Institut für Ethik und Geschichte der Medizin in Freiburg, Germany. (shrink)

In his 1992 text ‘Force of Law’ Jacques Derrida makes the radical claim that the aura of law’s legitimacy is always achieved by virtue of an ideological sleight of hand. I argue that the radicality of this claim does not lie in its abandonment of the rule of law, nor is this claim a call to political quietism. Rather, Derrida charges us with the responsibility of interrogating the moments of law’s force or ideology. Following this suggestion I argue that one (...) important way that the law has maintained its aura of legitimacy is on the basis of an ideological appeal to the presumed natural or transparent nature of sexual complementarity. Through a reading of Hegel’s use of the Greek mythological Antigone, I argue that one important way that the im possibility of the necessary encounter between law and the singular case has been covered over, is by way of an appeal to the presumed naturalness of heterosexuality. The conclusion of my analysis is that the illusion of law’s legitimacy is not necessarily achieved with reference to the feminine, nor by virtue of an appeal to the transparency of heterosexuality, but it is no coincidence that it has been achieved in this way so often in the history of political philosophy either. However, no matter how the illusion of law’s legitimacy is achieved, it will always require a sleight of hand; it will always be ideological and therefore political. This analysis therefore serves as an example of how deconstruction can be mobilized as much more than a philosophical meditation on the impossibility of justice; rather, it offers a mode of analysis of critical importance to social and legal theorists. Key Words: Antigone • Derrida • Hegel • sexual difference. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Speeches of Cicero: Context, Law, RhetoricJohn NicholsonPaul MacKendrick. The Speeches of Cicero: Context, Law, Rhetoric, with the technical assistance of Emmett L. Bennett, Jr. London: Duckworth, 1995. viii + 627 pp. Cloth, £55.Readers familiar with MacKendrick’s 1989 study of The Philosophical Books of Cicero will have an idea what to expect from his new companion work on Cicero’s speeches. It is essentially a factual handbook providing a (...) full and careful summary of the contents of Cicero’s major orations, along with some basic background information and a rhetorical analysis. The treatment is quite detailed so that, despite a length of well over 600 pages, the book covers only half of the fifty-eight extant Ciceronian speeches. Regrettably omitted on account of limitation of space are all the Verrines and all the Philippics, as well as any representatives of the early orations. But otherwise, we get a judicious, well-balanced selection from all rhetorical types, lengths, and audiences.MacKendrick begins in medias res. What he calls chapter 1 is actually only a two-page chronological outline of Cicero’s life, and this is the only preface we get before plunging into the presentation of the first speech (On Pompey’s Command) which comprises chapter 2. It would have been helpful if MacKendrick had begun with some kind of statement about his aims and methods, and perhaps some introduction to the ways and means of classical rhetoric in general, and of Ciceronian oratory in particular. Such preliminaries will be especially missed by neophyte readers who select this book as an introduction to Cicero’s speeches. Otherwise the work is well suited to this audience since MacKendrick takes little for granted, translates into English virtually all the Latin he quotes, and repeatedly defines technical terms.The format of each chapter is strictly uniform, divided into four sections. First comes an outline summarizing in full detail the content of the speech under consideration, with the standard divisions marked off and labeled. (Here alone MacKendrick fails to define rhetorical terminology; structural labels like narratio, partitio, peroratio, etc. are left unexplained.) Second, there comes a section called “Context” succinctly describing the historical background. Third, MacKendrick gives a summary of the legal points raised by each speech, which is kept quite brief, depending largely on the conclusions of standard modern authorities, especially A. H. C. Greenidge’s time-honored Legal Procedure of Cicero’s Time (which is unfortunately missing from the intended key reference on 460). The fourth and final section, called “Rhetoric,” is the fullest, and is divided into the subcategories of Word Frequency, Metaphor, and Other Rhetorical Devices.While the first three sections of each chapter merely rehearse basic information in a useful handbook format, it is in the fourth section on rhetoric that we get MacKendrick’s main original contribution, essentially a quantified word study of the speeches. Though he nowhere explicitly declares his analytical strategy, an early note decrying “the shapeless gobbledegook” (460 n. 2) of much [End Page 654] modern criticism reveals his contempt for sloppy subjective evaluation. Accordingly, his own approach here is largely statistical in nature, presumably based on computer-generated tabulations. The preoccupation is with quantitative analysis via word frequency lists and the counting and cataloging of metaphors and various rhetorical figures used by Cicero over the course of his career.MacKendrick first examines the semantic range and varying significance of the most commonly repeated words in each oration, and shows how Cicero manipulates them in different contexts. Personal pronouns usually head the lists, followed by terms such as res publica, urbs, civi[ta]s, consul, senatus, salus, omnis, lex, dignitas, bellum, and populus Romanus.Next he counts and classifies metaphors, a category which he defines very broadly—at times to the point of robbing the term of practical descriptive value inasmuch as extremely common words are analyzed as though poetic figures. For example, the verb fero and its many compounds are considered “metaphors of touch” even in standard idioms such as legem fero, while aequus is called a “metaphor of earth” (a subcategory of “metaphors of nature”), and intellego is called a “metaphor of agriculture” (since it literally means “to glean... (shrink)

A longstanding question at the intersection of science, philosophy, and theology is how God might act, or not, when governing the universe. Many believe that determinism would prevent God from acting at all, since to do so would require violating the laws of nature. However, when a robust view of these laws is coupled with the kind of determinism now used in dynamics, a new model of divine action emerges. This book presents a new approach to divine action beyond the (...) current focus on quantum mechanics and esoteric gaps in the causal order. It bases this approach on two general points. First, that there are laws of nature is not merely a metaphor. Second, laws and physical determinism are now understood in mathematically precise ways that have important implications for metaphysics. The explication of these two claims shows not only that nonviolationist divine action is possible, but there is considerably more freedom available for God to act than current models allow. By bringing a philosophical perspective to an issue often dominated by theologians and scientists, this text redresses an imbalance in the discussion around divine action. It will, therefore, be of keen interest to scholars of Philosophy and Religion, the Philosophy of Science, and Theology. (shrink)

The Law Most Beautiful and Best is a thoughtful and creative examination of the role irrational rhetoric ought to play in persuading citizens to voluntarily obey laws. Author Randall Baldwin Clark explores the figure of the physician in Plato's Laws to address this question, identifying the subtle ways in which Plato uses the physician's role in healing as a metaphor for the task of governance and arguing that Plato hints that rational discourse may ultimately be inadequate as a persuasive (...) technique. (shrink)

The article analyzes the metaphor “Copernican revolution,” used by Kant to highlight the core idea of his philosophy. The author argues that Kant uses the analogies with mathematics and natural science for establishing criteria of scientific character of knowledge. These criteria include the hypothetic-deductive or a priorimethod of thinking, which determines the apodictic, i.e. necessary and objective, character of the basic laws of nature, as well as the verification of laws a priorithrough experiments.The author focuses on Kant’s idea of (...) the possibility of scientific metaphysics based on these criteria. She claims that the structure of scientific metaphysics and the epistemological status of its statements depend on what kind of objects it deals with: with phenomena given to us by sensuality, with only conceivable “things in themselves” or with supersensitive “objects of an idea.” In the last part, the author interprets the meaning of the metaphor “Copernican turn” as the upgrading of logic, the idea of “transcendental idealism” and discusses the possibility of using the metaphor “Ptolemaic system” to characterize the practical philosophy of Kant. (shrink)

The article uses embodiment and the experiential basis of conceptual metaphor to argue for the metaphorical essence of abstract legal thought.concepts like ‘law’ and ‘justice’ need to borrow from a spatial, bodily, or physical prototype in order to be conceptualised, seen, for example, in the fact that justice preferably is found ‘under’ law. Three conceptual categories of how law is conceptualised is examined: law as an object, law as a vertical relation, and law as an area. The Google Ngram (...) Viewer, based on the massive library of books that Google has scanned, has been used to study legally relevant conceptions over time within each of these three categories, from 1800 to 2000. In addition, the article suggests a type of analytical method of ‘metaphor triangulation,’ that is, the replacement of prevailing metaphors with unusual ones in order to increase the level of awareness of what conceptual content the prevailing metaphors involve. (shrink)

The present work examines the role of persuasive lexicon in legal discourse through the analysis of emotional devices at a lexical and rhetorical level. Our preliminary premise is that emotion is deployed by experts to convey the sentiment of shared values and epistemic trust: the need to rely on the tenets of the law as fair and conducive to the common good. The corpus of our study is constituted by the conclusions in their original Spanish, and their translation into English, (...) by the Advocate General Manuel Campos on the challenge by Hungary and Poland of the regulation establishing a “conditionality regime” in the event of a rule-of-law breach in a EU Member State. To this end, we undertake a two-pronged analysis of legal persuasion to find out what emotional devices are deployed to convey the rule-of-law principles of justice, non-discrimination, equality and solidarity. At a first stage, we concentrate upon the polarity and intensity of emotion words and their categories. Emotional implicatures in the shape of legal technolects and metaphorical ontologies and the way they are deployed in each text constitutes the second part of our study. Among our conclusions are that both the original and target texts have a strong persuasive character, mainly grounded in the negative emotion of fear and the positive emotion of trust, and that there are variances in the emotional language deployed in either version due to the different mechanics of each law system and to functional differences between English and Spanish. (shrink)

Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, his main work of theoretical philosophy, frequently uses metaphors from law. In this first book-length study in English of Kant's legal metaphors and their role in the first Critique, Sofie Møller shows that they are central to Kant's account of reason. Through an analysis of the legal metaphors in their entirety, she demonstrates that Kant conceives of reason as having a structure mirroring that of a legal system in a natural right framework. Her study shows (...) that Kant's aim is to make cognisers become similar to authorized judges within such a system, by proving the legitimacy of the laws and the conditions under which valid judgments can be pronounced. These elements consolidate her conclusion that reason's systematicity is legal systematicity. (shrink)

This study investigated the interconnected relationship between playful metaphors and sex jokes at the linguistic, conceptual, and discourse levels. Two ontological conceptual metaphors and two specific-level metaphors emerged. They demonstrated that variations in the form of empty metaphors and the creative invention of metaphors are still fundamentally iconic. The conceptual representation of sex acts is closely related to the cultural and ethnic specificity embedded in folk knowledge, such as food culture, the broader context of the physical environment and historical traditions, (...) and the conception of family relationships. Metaphors in sex stories showed that the shared values of Hakka people have pragmatic and socio-cultural implications. Seen as an in-between other by their blood family and their in-laws’ family, Hakka women are under dual strict cultural disciplines for their expected behaviors as women and for their expected roles as daughters-in-law. Metaphors in sex jokes serve as covert and humorous carriers to get around the uneasiness of socially tabooed and embarrassing topics regarding Hakka women and at the same time maintain relational and social harmony. (shrink)

This paper focuses on two legal languages such as the legal English developed by the European Union institutions and the legal Chinese of Mainland China, to study whether the mental representations and the embodied simulation created by the conceptual metaphors for the same Western concept, right, differ in any significant ways. By analysing the data contained in two large corpora, this study has found that, despite the common origin of the concept right in the two legal languages, they conceptualise it (...) in a significantly different fashion. Finally, the findings of this study are read through the theoretical framework proposed for this special issue—hybridity and the Third Space. While it is somewhat straightforward to conceive of Euro English as a hybrid language, owing to the multilingual and supranational setting where it is used, this study has found that the Chinese legal language, too, is a hybrid language exhibiting linguistic features that intersect different belief systems. (shrink)

This paper critically examines the metaphorical use of medical terms in philosophy. Three examples selected from distinct philosophical contexts demonstrate that such terms have been employed as metaphors both to describe the practice of philosophising and historically to diagnose philosophical positions. The selected examples are (i) the title of Avicenna’s main philosophical work, The Book of Healing, (ii) the criticism of medical metaphors in Enlightenment philosophy, and (iii) recent historical diagnoses in philosophy. The underlying epistemological assumptions of all three contexts (...) are reconstructed to critically analyse the medical metaphors. Through this tripartite synopsis, I arrive at a normative conclusions medical metaphors, such as the “healing of the soul” or “pathology of reason”, do not stand up to the critique of Enlightenment and are obsolete against the theoretical background of my reference texts. (shrink)

The usage of metaphor in languages for specific purposes has been in the focus of interest of cognitive linguistics for years, especially after Lakoff and Johnson published their famous book “Metaphors We Live by” in 1980. Inspired by that book, the author strives to prove that metaphor was not only intensely present in the history of law but also that it pervades the language of contemporary legal theory and practice. Terms like _injury of law, the burden of evidence, (...) soft laws, hard laws,_ etc. are so often used by lawyers in their professional communication that they are hardly recognizable as metaphors. In the theoretical part, the terms _conceptual metaphor_ and _lexical metaphor_, as well as _the source domain_ and _the target domain of the metaphor_ are defined. Accordingly, conceptual metaphor and lexical metaphor are interpreted from the perspective of the language of law. As an introduction to the discussion on metaphoric terms in the field of law, a number of metaphors is presented and discussed from the point of view of legal history, as the metaphoric and other poetic expressions were recognized as the features of legalese back in the early seventeenth century. In the main part, the author presents and discusses the most common conceptual metaphors in connection with the terms _law, justice, court,_ and the types of metaphors typically used in specific branches of law as criminal law, company law, and contract law. The empirical part of the paper is focused on two research tasks. Firstly, metaphors occurring in selected Legal English textbooks are explored and discussed by using a qualitative and a quantitative approach, and secondly, metaphoric terms and phrases of the EU Law are excerpted from the Treaty Establishing the European Community (Consolidated version 2002), the main task being to establish the frequency of metaphors in this relatively young branch of law and the types of conceptual metaphors they belong to. In the closing part, conclusions on similarities and differences in the use of metaphor between two different types of legal texts are drawn with specific reference to the frequency, lexical structures, and typology of conceptual metaphors in the field of law. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Miracle of MetaphorRethinking the State of Exception with Rosenzweig and SchmittBonnie Honig (bio)For the word is mere inception until it finds reception in an ear and response in a mouth.—Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of RedemptionThe legal anthropologist Carol Greenhouse opens her book on time, A Moment’s Notice, with a story recorded by Goethe, who, when traveling through Italy, observed a trial and took note of its peculiar timekeeping (...) practices. A man seated at a desk held in his hand a glass sand bottle, a timepiece. It was not immediately clear what his purpose was. But Goethe soon noticed that as the prosecutor spoke the man kept the bottle lying on its side, its sands inert, and whenever the defense began to speak the man would turn the bottle upright and restart its sand flow. When the state spoke, time stopped. The defense, however, was subject to time.The story accords well with the views of state sovereignty propounded by Carl Schmitt, who identifies sovereignty as such with the power to legally suspend law for a time by declaring a state of exception. For Schmitt, as for Giorgio Agamben, who works in his wake, the state of exception is that paradoxical situation in which the law is legally suspended by sovereign power. The ensuing condition is one in which we—or, rather, sovereign powers—are neither subject to law nor free of it but rather both, since the state of exception is itself a legal condition of alegality. Grounded in paradox—the legal suspension of law—and seeming well positioned to explain elements of the current political landscape that liberal and deliberative democratic theorists only criticize, Schmitt’s “state of exception,” I think it is fair to say, has captured the imagination of contemporary political theory.I seek to loosen its hold on our imagination by pluralizing the particular political theology on which Schmitt’s account is based and from which it draws sustenance. And I do so with the intent of highlighting the dependence of the so-called state of exception upon democratic energies and its vulnerability, therefore, to democratic action and resistance.I begin by devoting sustained attention to Schmitt’s metaphor for the state of exception—the miracle, noting that we may accept his metaphorization and yet be drawn by it to very different conclusions. Alternative conceptions of miracle, as we shall see, point not to singular sovereign ruptural power but rather to receptivity, popular power, and the importance of orientation in everyday life to divinity or sovereignty. For this alternative, I turn to Franz Rosenzweig’s theology. Another implication of the work begun here is to lay the groundwork for questioning contemporary identifications of action with event and politics with singularity. I ask whether the metaphor of miracle, normally taken to mark extraordinary, ruptural, or inaugurative politics (as, for example, by Hannah Arendt), might not license instead a turn to the ordinary, away from rupture to the everyday, from transcendence to immanence (though, as William Connolly points out, the immanent can also be ruptural [Pluralism] and, as Eric Santner points out, the rupture sought by Rosenzweig’s new thinking is one that would return us to a different ordinary [On the [End Page 78] Psychotheology of Everyday Life and “Miracles Happen”]). Motivating this exploration is an intuition: that contemporary political theory’s debates about whether political action is best seen as ordinary or extraordinary, ruptural or rule-governed, may be a reiteration of earlier debates in political theology about the status of the extraordinary—god and miracle or divine agency—in the ordinary human world. Mindful of that reiteration, and with the help of Rosenzweig’s “new theology,” we may rechart our course and see opportunities to rethink emergency politics in the state of exception in more democratic terms.A Secret Conversation?In Political Theology, Carl Schmitt, the soon-to-be-lapsed Catholic legal thinker who would later become jurist to the Nazi party in 1930s Germany, claimed that all significant political concepts are reinhabitations of theological concepts and should be treated as such. In The Enemy, an intellectual biography of Schmitt, Gopal Balakrishnan points out this is an overstatement... (shrink)

Analogy, as the connection of similar things, is present in all fields of human thought. Art uses verbal (in poetry, literature, art criticism) and optical analogies(in the visual arts), aiming at an emotional perception and interpretation of the world. Philosophy and the sciences also use largely analogical applications, as ameans to construct intuitionally understandable theories. In Law the analogical application of laws is an efficient way to regulate social conflicts. The risk,however, of cognitive distortions, by transferring inadequately explanatory models to (...) other fields, created doubts about the rational appropriateness of suchmethodological tools. Applications of analogical thinking in different domains are readily comprehensible, if the role of analogies in each of them is analysed. Thedifferent aims of science, philosophy and art imply different similarity-criteria to support the transfer of linguistic and visual expressions in regions to which theydo not have a direct connection and application. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy and Rhetoric 34.1 (2001) 21-37 [Access article in PDF] Conscience and the Concealments of Metaphor in Hobbes's Leviathan Karen S. Feldman Introduction Conscience is not a topic of terribly heated debate in Hobbes research. 1 Nevertheless, my claim in this article is that conscience in the Leviathan, which Hobbes poses as an example of the dangers of metaphor, is not merely an example of the dangers (...) of metaphor, but rather is the most dangerous metaphor, the metaphor that corrupts knowledge and thereby makes error and deception possible. Hobbes's brief account of conscience, which appears in the chapter of Leviathan on the ends of discourse, tells the story of the insinuation of metaphor into proper nomenclature; however, his example of the metaphorical use of the word conscience turns the story into one in which public knowledge itself is made private and thereby corrupted. Moreover, according to the story, private conscience is itself invented by means of a metaphor; it is in effect metaphorized into being. 2 With the emergence of private conscience, the potential of privatization expands from the privatization of the meaning of words to an entire private sphere of opinion. The metaphorical corruption of conscience invents a new understanding of knowledge as isolated from other witnesses, and the resultant privatization of truth lends itself to the corruption of that truth. Thus, whereas Hobbes characterizes the wrong use of names (of which metaphor is an instance) as a threat to accurate judgment and reason (L 22-23, 34, 161-62), as I will argue in the sections following, Hobbes's demand for the preservation of proper meaning in Leviathan corresponds to an anxiety regarding privacy and its peculiar potential for corrupting truth and knowledge. Hobbes's worries as to the dangers that metaphor poses to the stability of the commonwealth thereby converge with his worries about the dangers of conscience to the principle of public authority (cf. Strong 1993). [End Page 21] Hobbes's condemnations of conscience In Leviathan, conscience is condemned as a source of principles of human decision and action in a commonwealth. The problem with conscience as a principle of action is that it renders each individual inventor of his own rules and judge of his own actions. In brief, individual conscience is incommensurable with the public authority that defines a commonwealth: Another doctrine repugnant to civil society, is, that whatsoever a man does against his conscience, is sin; and it dependeth on the presumption of making himself judge of good and evil. For a man's conscience, and his judgment is the same thing, and as the judgment, so also the conscience may be erroneous. Therefore, though he that is subject to no civil law, sinneth in all he does against his conscience, because he has no other rule to follow but his own reason; yet it is not so with him that lives in a commonwealth; because the law is the public conscience, by which he hath already undertaken to be guided. Otherwise in such diversity, as there is of private consciences, which are but private opinions, the commonwealth must needs be distracted, and no man dare to obey the sovereign power, further than it shall seem good in his own eyes. (L 311) In this account, conscience is not just inferior to civil law as a principle guiding action, but at odds with civil society and the good of the commonwealth. The fact that conscience is private renders it problematic for the commonwealth for several reasons: First, as privately invented, it may be erroneous. Likewise, because it is private, conscience does not possess any binding power outside the individual, private sphere. Each person may be bound by his own conscience, but insofar as consciences differ, standards of action differ, and this leads to the undermining and distraction of the commonwealth. Likewise, private consciences may be divergent from one another, and the conflicts in private judgment produce conflicting actions that disturb the peace of the commonwealth. This rule of privacy is, moreover, associated with primitive life and with the state of nature... (shrink)

In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, more than 4 million Italians migrated to the United States of America (U.S.), which they regarded as a utopia. The film _The Legend of 1900_, which was inspired by Alessandro Baricco’s monologue _Nocecento_ and directed by Giuseppe Tornatore, tells the story about the genius pianist 1900, an orphan, who is fostered by Danny, a black coalman in the boiler room of an ocean liner, and whose parents are presumably Italian immigrants. Due to (...) immigration law, 1900, a man with neither identity, visa, nor legal papers, cannot legally set foot on American soil. As a genius pianist, his existence is nothing more than that of musician—an entertainer to passengers on the gigantic trans-Atlantic liner Virginian, the only place he is permitted to live. According to Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, a ship is “a piece of floating space, a placeless place”—a vessel transporting people to the land of their dreams. However, 1900, who has no legal status, will never arrive in utopia aboard Virginian. He can only construct a heterotopia—a mirror of utopia—so that it to him is a utopia. In the eyes of the law, 1900 is a legally non-existent person on Virginian, a placeless place. However, it is this lawless heterotopia and isolation that create a genius. In this paper, I illustrate how Virginian, as a place outside the law of land, metaphorically gives birth to a pianist, 1900, and why 1900 at the end chooses not to leave the ship, while also discussing the meaning behind the film and the relationship between law and space. (shrink)

This work takes a fresh look at legal language as one of the Languages for Specific Purposes (LSP) that has been traditionally characterized as obscure and impenetrable for those outside the profession. I will show how metaphors in legal language provide referential meaning that is sometimes misconstrued by observers who may be unfamiliar with the procedural aspects of the US system of justice, and how those identified as conceptual metaphors in legal language are either _linguistic metaphors_ or some other rhetorical (...) device, such as metonymies. I will then discuss the special challenges of transferring meaning from English into a foreign language during legal proceedings for the benefit of Limited English Proficient (LEP) participants in the process, such as litigants, witnesses, and criminal defendants. Taking into account the translation and interpreting studies that have had a bearing on the practice of judiciary interpreting in United States, and the results of a survey and virtual discussion with federally certified interpreters, I will describe some of the strategies used by these language professionals to convey metaphorical meaning to LEP court participants. (shrink)

In the metaphor of behavioral momentum, the rate of a free operant in the presence of a discriminative stimulus is analogous to the velocity of a moving body, and resistance to change measures an aspect of behavior that is analogous to its inertial mass. An extension of the metaphor suggests that preference measures an analog to the gravitational mass of that body. The independent functions relating resistance to change and preference to the conditions of reinforcement may be construed (...) as convergent measures of a single construct, analogous to physical mass, that represents the effects of a history of exposure to the signaled conditions of reinforcement and that unifies the traditionally separate notions of the strength of learning and the value of incentives. Research guided by the momentum metaphor encompasses the effects of reinforcement on response rate, resistance to change, and preference and has implications for clinical interventions, drug addiction, and self-control. In addition, its principles can be seen as a modern, quantitative version of Thorndike's (1911) Law of Effect, providing a new perspective on some of the challenges to his postulation of strengthening by reinforcement. Key Words: behavioral momentum; clinical interventions; drug addiction; preference; reinforcement; resistance to change; response strength; self-control. (shrink)