Volume 61, Issue 2 -

Understanding the relationship of law and violence is one of the most important tasks for a postmodern critical legal theory. In his recent book Recht und Gewalt Christoph Menke explores the thesis that violence is not something external to law but an essential part of its constitution. While his concise analysis reveals the fundamental conflict of autonomy and societal responsivity of law, I suggest that we have to radicalize his concept in three ways. First, I propose to reconsider the belief that law requires a polity (I). Second, I will argue that reflexivity of law needs to be conceived of as a process of fundamental democratization of law (II). Third, I propose that we not only need to depotentiate and displace the law, but that we have to transcend the law (III). For only transcending the law enables us to appeal to the utopian notion of a justice to come.

Since Kant, many philosophers have struggled to overcome the problems of an empiricist conception of the self. In this paper I argue that Heidegger’s philosophy in Being and Time has to be considered as one of the most powerful attempts to gain an anti-empiricist conception of the self and its unity. I highlight the power of Heidegger’s conception by contrasting it with contemporary empiricist conceptions, namely those of Dennett and Velleman. The basic aspect of Heidegger’s conception can be captured by the claim that the unity of the subject is constituted by relations to an open future.

The aim of this paper is an ontological clarification of the concept of artefact. The following questions are addressed: 1. Do artefacts constitute an ontological category of objects in its own right, and if so, how could this category be characterized? 2. How do artefacts come into existence? 3. What kind of artefacts are there, and in which relations do they stand to each other? It is argued that artefacts are characterized essentially through their genesis and that they owe their existence to mental acts of a particular kind, which I call “acts of creation”. It is maintained that there are not only concrete, material artefacts, but also abstract artefacts, that is, artefacts that cannot be perceived through the senses and are not located in space. Furthermore, it shall be claimed that in a sense those abstract artefacts are even primary to the concrete, material artefacts.

In this section (i. e. section 13) of his monograph Material Beings , first published in 1990, the author discusses certain sentences – sentences such as “This house has stood here for three hundred years” – that are usually discussed in connection with “the problem of identity through time”. It is argued that these sentences cannot have any very intimate connection with that problem (whatever exactly that problem may be), for there are – as the author suggests by proposing an answer to the so-called Special Composition Question – no such things as houses or other artefacts, and thus there is no problem about their persistence through time.

Material artefacts consist of many smaller – and ultimately natural – objects such as molecules and atoms that have been intentionally rearranged in such a way as to take the shape of a particular artefact (e.g. a hammer) and fulfil its functions. Whenever the arrangement of several parts results in properties that go beyond the properties of the individual parts or their sum, it can be said that this arrangement has resulted in a new object. Once created, material artefacts may take part in natural processes such as reproduction and evolution and cannot be fundamentally distinguished from fully natural objects. This article provides a number of – mainly biological – examples that show the traditional Aristotelian dichotomy between nature and artefacts to be highly problematic and suggest a continuum instead. Most importantly, it is argued that living beings and artefacts are equally capable – or sometimes incapable – of self-reproduction and that there are numerous objects which are both living beings and artefacts.

It is widespread practice to define artefacts as entities that owe their existence to plan-based acts of production that aim at a certain use of the produced thing. According to this definition, artefacts are essentially intention-dependent. For this reason, artefacts are threatened by marginalisation within standard naturalised ontologies. I discuss three families of marginalisation strategies: elimination, reduction and supervenience. I argue that all of these strategies fail, as they lead to false implications, with the possible exception of four-dimensional supervenience, which might well be true, but remains completely uninformative in respect to artefacts. The crucial issue in this regard is what Peter van Inwagen calls the Duplication Principle which is undermined by thought experiments involving chance entities or duplication. Hence, materialistic ontologies are not, as Peter van Inwagen wants us to believe, a Copernican revolution in ontology; they are simply not adequate for the domain of artefacts.

Copies of artefacts are ubiquitous in our lifeworld and have gained influence on several domains such as economy, culture and science. This development has induced wide-ranging public debates about how to evaluate copying processes regarding their legitimacy, which up to the present day have not reached consensus. This situation calls for an ethics of copying. However, such an ethics has not been elaborated in detail up to the present day. This paper aims at creating foundations of an artefact-related ethics of copying by giving a sketch of an answer to the question of what it means to illegitimately copy an artefact. In order to achieve this, I firstly define “artefact copy” to limit the subject area of such an ethics. Secondly, I answer the question of where to draw the line between legitimate and illegitimate processes of copying.

The study at hand critically approaches tendencies of routine and sluggishness in the recent reception of Walter Benjamin’s writings, highlighting and explaining apologetic interpretations in studies which limit themselves to explain the internal logic of Benjamin’s concepts. To that end, it first casts a glance at the debate on how to faithfully translate these concepts. In a second step, it scrutinizes contributors to subaltern studies who use elements of Benjamin’s “pre-history of modernity” in their attempt to uncover historical differences in the process of globalization. To examine their strategies, the present article draws on Latin American perspectives on Benjamin and their attempts to globalize and de-colonize his work.

Zusammenfassung Volker Gerhardt: Öffentlichkeit. Die Form des politischen Bewusstseins. Verlag C. H. Beck, München 2012, 584 S.

Zusammenfassung Hans Joas: Die Sakralität der Person. Eine neue Genealogie der Menschenrechte. Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt/M. 2011, 303 S.

Zusammenfassung Kurt Bayert: Der aufrechte Gang. Eine Geschichte des anthropologischen Denkens. Verlag C. H. Beck, München 2012, 415 S.

Zusammenfassung Peter Vogt: Kontingenz und Zufall. Eine Ideen- und Begriffsgeschichte. Akademie Verlag, Berlin 2011, 730 S.