lunedì 23 novembre 2009

Christian Religion and the Shape of Property


Bable on Witte & Alexander on Law and Christianity

Paul T. Babie (University of Adelaide - Law School) has posted Looking East to the Concept of Property A Review Essay of Witte and Alexander, Christianity and Law: An Introduction (Adelaide Law Review, Forthcoming) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:
    The notion that there is anything like ‘Christian law’ in the way that there is Islamic law, Judaic law, or Hindu law is little understood. Yet, increasingly, scholars, both lawyers and theologians, tell us that one finds in the Western legal tradition itself a form of Christian law, at least in origin if not contemporary operation. 

sabato 21 novembre 2009

Managing Meaning: The Use of Metaphor in Policy



Sarah Armstrong of Glasgow University posted on SSRN an Article on the Use of Metaphor summarised in the following
Abstract:     
This paper takes an unorthodox approach to the study of policy, by analysing the use of metaphors in policy documents. Policy language presents an important topic of study because the policy text is an increasingly important technique of governance, aiming at one level to satisfy desires for transparency and public consultation, and, at another, to translate law and norms into technical rules of everyday practice. Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) provides the methodology for exploring the role metaphors play in policy texts. While metaphor is, outside of linguistics, commonly treated as an optional linguistic ornament used to convey an unfamiliar concept in terms of a familiar one, CMT claims metaphors are ever present features of language and fundamental to knowing. Analysis of metaphors in a key (Scottish) criminal justice policy text provides a case study for analysing how metaphors assist understanding a new category of offender – the serious violent and sexual offender. Equally important, the paper considers the possibility that the means of controlling such offenders – risk management – is itself a metaphor.


Keywords: policy analysis, metaphor analysis, rhetoric, risk management, serious violent and sexual offenders, Conceptual Metaphor Theory

giovedì 19 novembre 2009

Carlos Fernandez Sessarego




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martedì 17 novembre 2009

Maurizio Ferraris on Documentality and Social Ontology

Documentalità. Perché è necessario lasciar tracce

di Ferraris Maurizio 

read the book


Objects come in three kinds: (1) physical objects (mountains, rivers, human bodies, and
animals) that exist in space and in time, and are independent from subjects knowing them,
even though they may have built them, as for artifacts (chairs, screwdrivers); (2) ideal objects
(numbers, theorems, relations) that exist outside of space and time, and are independent
from the subjects knowing them, but which, after having been discovered, can be socialized;
(3) social objects, that do not exist as such in space, since their physical presence is
limited to the inscription, but last in time, and whose existence depends on the subjects
who know, or at least can use, them and who, in certain cases, have constituted them.
This latter circumstance display us the fact that social objects, for which construction is
necessary, depends on social acts, whose inscription constitutes the object. As I show
through the law Object = Inscribed Act, social objects consist in the recording of acts that
encompass at least two people, and are characterized by being inscribed, on a physical substrate
what so ever, from marble to neurons, passing through paper and computers.
If all this is true, then a theory of social objects develops naturally into a theory of the
document, understood as an inquire centered on the definition of what I call “documentality”,
namely the properties that constitute, in each case, the necessary and sufficient conditions
to be a social object. At last, there is no society if there are no documents, and documents
are records with a particular social value.

Imagery, Ambiguity and Culture by Miroslav Vojtěchovský

The invention of photography is, according to Vilém Flusser, one of the most challenging
philosophers of the second half of the 20th century – a decisive and historical turning point, as much
so as the invention of linear writing in the 2nd millennium BC. As the first of modern mechanical
media, photography became ubiquitous, but after the more than 160 years of its existence, it is
perhaps more enigmatic now than it seemed to be at the time of its invention,
read more

domenica 8 novembre 2009

A New Site on Law & Aesthetics



A new site has been devoted to collect ideas and new related to the field of intersection between law, politics, representation and aesthetics trynig to reach a deeper understanding of the thresholds lying across these boundaries and their potentially impressive meaning

Document Ontology 1.0 Revisited


9 years later it is worth visiting again the old but still capturing stuff embodied in the document ontology draft 1.0