Reasoning With Rules

There is currently no description available.

Justice to Future Generations and the Environment There is, on the one hand, a desire for justice that tends towards the definition of transhistorical standards, detached from the particular values ofthe time and place; there is, on the other hand, a motivational background that is tied to our present position in history, and nourished by the values we presently believe in. Although the desire for justice supplies an independent reason for action, the unprecedented character of the context in which that reason must operate necessarily raises the question of its psychological support: we want justice for future people, but what interest do we have in their welfare in the first place? I have tried to capture this double orientation by making use of Thomas Nagel's conceptual dichotomy between the objective, detached point of view, and the subjective (in our case: the cuturally and historically situated) perspective. I have attempted to bridge the gap between the one and the other dimension by different conceptual avenues, the principal one being a time-related interpretation of Rawls' concept of equal liberty: justice wants us to maintain the worth of liberty over time by perpetuating the conditions of its meaningful exercise.

Indeed, as we shall see as this work progresses, the issues raised are central to moral psychology, religion, professional ethics, medical ethics, and the nature of moral systems generally.. Something is beyond the control of the agent if the agent cannot determine whether or not it is present, what its content consists of, or whether or not (or in what way) it influences her.

.This chapter also contains two new contributions, a detailed discussion of Gordon's Pleadings Game, and a general description of a multi-Iayered overall view on the structure of argu­ mentation, comprising a logieal, dialectical, procedural and strategie layer. This book is a revised and extended version of my PhD Thesis 'Logical Tools for Modelling Legal Argument', which I defended on 14 January 1993 at the Free University Amsterdam. Finally, in the revised conclusion I have paid more attention to the relevance of my investigations for legal philosophy and argumentation theory.

There is currently no description available.

Kantianism, Postmodernism and Critical Legal Thought Kantianism, Postmodernism and Critical Legal Thought presents an intellectual history of critical legal thinking, beginning with Kant, and then proceeding through philosphers and legal theorists as diverse as Heidegger and Arendt, Foucault and Derrida, Rorty and Rawls, and Unger and Dworkin. In doing so, it further suggests that the often perceived distance between these theories of law disguises a common intellectual foundation..

Such a treatment overlooks the fact that legal principles and rules are not statements which describe the world, but rather means by which humans impose structure on the world.Rule-applying legal arguments are traditionally treated as a kind of syllogism.

There is currently no description available.

Such a treatment overlooks the fact that legal principles and rules are not statements which describe the world, but rather means by which humans impose structure on the world.

There is currently no description available.