We’re delighted to announce the recent publication of three books by or about the work of members of the Department of Philosophy.
The Long Arc of Legality: Hobbes, Kelsen, Hart (Cambridge University Press, 2022), by David Dyzenhaus, breaks the current deadlock in philosophy of law between legal positivism and natural law by showing that any understanding of law as a matter of authority must account for the interaction of enacted law with fundamental principles of legality. This interaction conditions law’s content, so that officials have the moral resources to answer the legal subject’s question, “But, how can that be law for me?” Dyzenhaus brings Thomas Hobbes and Hans Kelsen into a dialogue with H. L. A. Hart, showing that philosophy of law must work with the idea of legitimate authority and its basis in the social contract. He argues that the legality of international law and constitutional law are integral to the main tasks of philosophy of law, and that legal theory must attend both to the politics of legal space and to the way in which law provides us with a public conscience.
Alasdair Urquhart on Nonclassical and Algebraic Logic and Complexity of Proofs (Springer, 2021), edited by Edwin Mares and Ivo Düntsch, focuses on the work of Professor Emeritus Alasdair Urquhart. It opens with an introduction to and an overview of Urquhart’s work, as well as an autobiographical essay by Urquhart. Papers on algebraic logic and lattice theory, papers on the complexity of proofs, and papers on philosophical logic and history of logic follow this introductory section. The volume closes with a response to Urquhart’s important contributions to logic.
The Public Uses of Coercion and Force: From Constitutionalism to War (Oxford University Press, 2021), edited by Ester Herlin-Karnell and Enzo Rossi uses Arthur Ripstein‘s recent Kant and the Law of War as a focal point to explore the extremes of modern states’ authority claims—the constitutional level and acts of war—discussing this connection through the lens of the (just) war theory and its relationship to the law. The Public Uses of Coercion and Force asks many key questions: What, if any, are the normatively salient differences between states’ internal coercion and the external use of force? Is it possible to isolate the constitutional level from other aspects of the state’s coercive reach? How could that be done while also guaranteeing a robust conception of human rights and adherence to the rule of law? With individual replies by Ripstein to chapters, this book holds interest to anyone interested in constitutional law, justice, philosophy of law, criminal law theory, and political science.
While Deleuze, a Stoic (Edinburgh University Press, 2020), by visiting professor Ryan Johnson, originally came out in hard cover in 2020, the book is now newly available in paperback. The work reveals a lasting influence on Gilles Deleuze by mapping his provocative reading of the Stoics and unearths possibilities for bridging contemporary and ancient philosophy. Additionally, Johnson introduces the untranslated Stoic scholarship published by pre- and post-Deleuzian French philosophers of antiquity to the English-reading world.
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