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Law and the Limits of Reason

Author : Adrian Vermeule

Publisher : Oxford University Press

Page : 220 pages

File Size : 40,88 MB

Release : 2008-12-23

Category : Law

ISBN : 0199745153

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Book Description

Human reason is limited. Given the scarcity of reason, how should the power to make constitutional law be allocated among legislatures, courts and the executive, and how should legal institutions be designed? In Law and the Limits of Reason, Adrian Vermeule denies the widespread view, stemming from Burke and Hayek, that the limits of reason counsel in favor of judges making "living" constitutional law in the style of the common law. Instead, he proposes and defends a "codified constitution" - a regime in which legislatures have the primary authority to develop constitutional law over time, through statutes and constitutional amendments. Vermeule contends that precisely because of the limits of human reason, large modern legislatures, with their numerous and highly diverse memberships and their complex internal structures for processing information, are the most epistemically effective lawmaking institutions.



The Limits of Reason

Author : John A. Eisenberg

Publisher : Transaction Publishers

Page : 198 pages

File Size : 25,56 MB

Release : 1992-01-01

Category : Reference

ISBN : 9781412837637

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Book Description

Through lucid theoretical analysis and his own extensive experience in these areas, he demonstrates that the outcomes of rationally conceived programs are usually at odds with the intended result. Eisenberg traces this failure to an intrinsic logical incompatibility between what reason tries to do and what it can do. Rational method is premised on the possibility of conceiving and correlating all operative factors in a given process. However, all such factors cannot be taken into account. Using a social variation of the "principle of indeterminancy," the author notes that reason cannot take itself into account any more than the eye can see itself seeing or the hand can grasp itself grasping. Similarly, reason cannot control how institutional structure affects social behavior, nor how legal language determines social reality. Eisenberg locates an intrinsic indeterminacy in society that precludes total or even substantial understanding and control of our destinies



Cicero on Politics and the Limits of Reason

Author : Jed W. Atkins

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 285 pages

File Size : 31,52 MB

Release : 2013-10-17

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1107513235

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Book Description

A prolific philosopher who also held Rome's highest political office, Cicero was uniquely qualified to write on political philosophy. In this book Professor Atkins provides a fresh interpretation of Cicero's central political dialogues - the Republic and Laws. Devoting careful attention to form as well as philosophy, Atkins argues that these dialogues together probe the limits of reason in political affairs and explore the resources available to the statesman given these limitations. He shows how Cicero appropriated and transformed Plato's thought to forge original and important works of political philosophy. The book demonstrates that Cicero's Republic and Laws are critical for understanding the history of the concepts of rights, the mixed constitution and natural law. It concludes by comparing Cicero's thought to the modern conservative tradition and argues that Cicero provides a perspective on utopia frequently absent from current philosophical treatments.



The Limits of Reason in Hobbes's Commonwealth

Author : Michael P. Krom

Publisher : A&C Black

Page : 241 pages

File Size : 27,81 MB

Release : 2011-10-06

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 1441182616

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Book Description

The Limits of Reason in Hobbes's Commonwealth explores Hobbes's attempt to construct a political philosophy of enduring peace on the foundation of the rational individual. Hobbes's rational individual, motivated by self-preservation, obeys the laws of the commonwealth and thus is conceived as the model citizen. Yet Hobbes intimates that there are limits to what such an actor will do for peace, and that the glory-seeker - "too rarely found to be presumed on" - is capable of a generosity that is necessary for political longevity. Michael P. Krom identifies this as a fundamental contradiction in Hobbes's system: he builds the commonwealth on the rational actor, yet acknowledges the need for the irrational glory-seeker. Krom argues that Hobbes's attempt to establish a "king of the proud" fails to overcome the limits of reason and the precariousness of politics. This book synthesizes recent work on Hobbes's understanding of glory and political stability, challenging the view that Hobbes succeeds in incorporating glory-seekers into his political theory and explores the implications of this for contemporary political philosophy after Rawls.



Kant: Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason

Author : Immanuel Kant

Publisher : Cambridge University Press

Page : 276 pages

File Size : 47,7 MB

Release : 1998-11-26

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 9780521599641

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Book Description

Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason is a key element of the system of philosophy which Kant introduced with his Critique of Pure Reason, and a work of major importance in the history of Western religious thought. It represents a great philosopher's attempt to spell out the form and content of a type of religion that would be grounded in moral reason and would meet the needs of ethical life. It includes sharply critical and boldly constructive discussions on topics not often treated by philosophers, including such traditional theological concepts as original sin and the salvation or 'justification' of a sinner, and the idea of the proper role of a church. This volume presents it and three short essays that illuminate it in new translations by Allen Wood and George di Giovanni, with an introduction by Robert Merrihew Adams that locates it in its historical and philosophical context.



The Limits of Blame

Author : Erin I. Kelly

Publisher : Harvard University Press

Page : 241 pages

File Size : 35,30 MB

Release : 2018-11-12

Category : Philosophy

ISBN : 0674980778

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Book Description

Faith in the power and righteousness of retribution has taken over the American criminal justice system. Approaching punishment and responsibility from a philosophical perspective, Erin Kelly challenges the moralism behind harsh treatment of criminal offenders and calls into question our society’s commitment to mass incarceration. The Limits of Blame takes issue with a criminal justice system that aligns legal criteria of guilt with moral criteria of blameworthiness. Many incarcerated people do not meet the criteria of blameworthiness, even when they are guilty of crimes. Kelly underscores the problems of exaggerating what criminal guilt indicates, particularly when it is tied to the illusion that we know how long and in what ways criminals should suffer. Our practice of assigning blame has gone beyond a pragmatic need for protection and a moral need to repudiate harmful acts publicly. It represents a desire for retribution that normalizes excessive punishment. Appreciating the limits of moral blame critically undermines a commonplace rationale for long and brutal punishment practices. Kelly proposes that we abandon our culture of blame and aim at reducing serious crime rather than imposing retribution. Were we to refocus our perspective to fit the relevant moral circumstances and legal criteria, we could endorse a humane, appropriately limited, and more productive approach to criminal justice.



The Expressive Powers of Law

Author : Richard H. McAdams

Publisher : Harvard University Press

Page : 335 pages

File Size : 21,23 MB

Release : 2015-02-09

Category : Law

ISBN : 0674967208

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Book Description

When asked why people obey the law, legal scholars usually give two answers. Law deters illicit activities by specifying sanctions, and it possesses legitimate authority in the eyes of society. Richard McAdams shifts the prism on this familiar question to offer another compelling explanation of how the law creates compliance: through its expressive power to coordinate our behavior and inform our beliefs. “McAdams’s account is useful, powerful, and—a rarity in legal theory—concrete...McAdams’s treatment reveals important insights into how rational agents reason and interact both with one another and with the law. The Expressive Powers of Law is a valuable contribution to our understanding of these interactions.” —Harvard Law Review “McAdams’s analysis widening the perspective of our understanding of why people comply with the law should be welcomed by those interested either in the nature of law, the function of law, or both...McAdams shows how law sometimes works by a power of suggestion. His varied examples are fascinating for their capacity both to demonstrate and to show the limits of law’s expressive power.” —Patrick McKinley Brennan, Review of Metaphysics



Common Good Constitutionalism

Author : Adrian Vermeule

Publisher : John Wiley & Sons

Page : 171 pages

File Size : 44,19 MB

Release : 2022-02-08

Category : Political Science

ISBN : 1509548882

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Book Description

The way that Americans understand their Constitution and wider legal tradition has been dominated in recent decades by two exhausted approaches: the originalism of conservatives and the “living constitutionalism” of progressives. Is it time to look for an alternative? Adrian Vermeule argues that the alternative has been there, buried in the American legal tradition, all along. He shows that US law was, from the founding, subsumed within the broad framework of the classical legal tradition, which conceives law as “a reasoned ordering to the common good.” In this view, law’s purpose is to promote the goods a flourishing political community requires: justice, peace, prosperity, and morality. He shows how this legacy has been lost, despite still being implicit within American public law, and convincingly argues for its recovery in the form of “common good constitutionalism.” This erudite and brilliantly original book is a vital intervention in America’s most significant contemporary legal debate while also being an enduring account of the true nature of law that will resonate for decades with scholars and students.



Human Rights and the Limits of Critical Reason

Author : Rolando Gaete

Publisher : Dartmouth Publishing Company

Page : 232 pages

File Size : 24,70 MB

Release : 1993

Category : Philosophy

ISBN :

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Book Description

"The rationalization of power has been an enduring feature of Modernity, assigning to human rights the task of subjecting the excesses of power to the scrutiny of critical reason." "Gaete examines this task in the wake of the crisis of modernity, when the belief that man can draw principles out of his own ground has lost its authority and when the very possibility of an enlightened, disinterested Reason is being questioned. The aim of the book is not to offer another critique of rights but to investigate how both rights and critiques are transformed by the rhetoric of power." "The author traces the discourse of judicial criticism as a series of rhetorical operations, bringing to light the paradoxes, antinomies and 'truth games' that permeate the field of human rights. He interrogates the discourse of modern humanism and investigates how its claims to being the law of the law and the metaphysics of the modern State shape the bond between State and citizen." "Gaete carries his argument across the fields of post-Nietzschean philosophy, anglo-american jurisprudence, political science, cultural and legal studies opening new ground for analyses of the rhetoric of rights."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved



Van Til and the Limits of Reason

Author : R. J. Rushdoony

Publisher : Chalcedon Foundation

Page : pages

File Size : 45,5 MB

Release : 2013-09-23

Category : History

ISBN : 187999867X

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Book Description

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that was a self-conscious move away from the Reformation’s emphasis on faith and revelation. It was the mind of man that became the new standard. “My own mind is my own church,” wrote Thomas Paine in his Age of Reason (Part First, 1794), which was an attack on all religion that claimed to be authoritative and Christianity in particular. It is not without case that Paine’s title is sometimes used as a synonym for the Enlightenment. Its rationalism saw faith as a blind confidence, a belief in nothing, while Hebrews 11:3 tells us it is “through faith we understand…” The Christian must see faith in God’s revelation as opening up understanding, as thinking God’s thoughts after Him, and rationalism as a restriction of thought to the narrow confines of human understanding. Reason is a gift of God, but we must not make more of it than it is. To see our reason as supreme is to see ourselves as supreme, and thereby repeat the sin of seeking to “be as gods” (Gen. 3:5). The first three essays of this volume were published in a small booklet in 1960 as a tribute to the thought of Dr. Cornelius Van Til, titled Van Til. The last four essays were written some time later and are published here for the first time.