In Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, Richard Posner wrestles with the ghost of John Dewey for the mantle of pragmatist jurisprudence. Most commentators have seen this work as pitting Posner against Dewey in a contest of pragmatisms, the stakes for which are no less than their respective legacies for legal and democratic theory. Some have sided with Posner and others with Dewey. I contend that the commentators have misidentified the target of Posner’s critique. Posner had another legal theorist in mind and (...) he was disingenuous in naming Dewey. A careful reconstruction of Posner’s argument shows that Dewey’s pragmatism provides a genuine middle way between Posner’s position and that of his intended rival. (shrink)

Carl Menger's methodology describes reality as neatly organized, being constructed additively from strictly regular simple elements called pure types. Such a conception of the world's structure seems to invite mathematical treatment. Yet, his economics is not a mathematical one, and he even explicitly rejected mathematical approach to economics. This apparent puzzle is explained by Menger's failure to deliver in his methodological writings a realistic portrayal of what he was actually doing in his economics. His implicit ambition to retain the full (...) meaning of the natural language concepts while using them simultaneously as theoretical concepts makes his economics dependent on the general human knowledge. Because the latter is mostly non-mathematical, so has to remain the former. This makes his economics both richer as well as fuzzier as compared with mathematical economics. This seems to be the result of a deliberate decision to keep his economic theory more realistic. (shrink)

Our purpose in this study – which stands at the crossroads of contemporary philosophy, anthropology, and religious studies – is to assess critically the plea for radical contingency in contemporary thought, with special attention to the work of Meillassoux, in light, among other things, of the symptomatic presence of Pauline motifs in the late twentieth to early twenty first-century philosophical arena, from Vattimo to Agamben and especially Badiou. Drawing on Aristotle’s treatment of τύχη and Hilan Bensusan’s neo-monadology (as well as (...) on the network biology of David George Haskell, Scott Gilbert’s holobiont hypothesis, and Terrence Deacon’s teleo-dynamics), we ask what is missing in such plea, from a theoretical standpoint. Next, we examine the relation between radical contingency and worldlessness in dialogue with Leroi-Gourhan’s theory of biocultural evolution, Lévi-Strauss’s structural anthropology, Pierre Clastres’s ethnography, Heidegger’s philosophy of language, and contemporary authors like Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Patrice Maniglier. These two parallel lines of inquiry help us explore what radical contingency, in turn, prevents us from thinking: the intersection of ontology, cosmopolitics, and modality. (shrink)

The article explores various aspects of understanding Paul. It focuses on his use of the expression ‘the gospel of God’ as the ‘good news’ that originates with God (a subjective genitive) and one that is about God (an objective genitive). The article argues that the cross and resurrection constitute the core of Paul’s message and that this message demands a new ethos because of the ‘dying and rising’ in participation with Christ Jesus. For Paul, the messianic era had already commenced. (...) In Paul’s point of view, the heart of the gospel was the announcement of a historical happening, namely the crucifixion of the historical Jesus which is connected to another ‘event’, namely the resurrection of Jesus, which does not qualify as history. For Paul, faith is engagement with the kerygma, and not a kind of loyalty to inherited religious customs. Faith implies undivided loyalty, a personal decision and commitment to believe what is proclaimed. (shrink)