Legal Validity Legal validity governs the enforceability of law, and the standard of legal validity enhances or restricts the ability of the political ruler to enforce his will through legal coercion. Western law adopts three competing standards of legal validity. Each standard emphasizes a different dimension of law (Berman 1988, P. 779), and each has its own school of jurisprudence. Legal positivism emphasizes law’s political

Hannah Arendt (1906—1975) Hannah Arendt is a twentieth century political philosopher whose writings do not easily come together into a systematic philosophy that expounds and expands upon a single argument over a sequence of works. Stattdessen, her thoughts span totalitarianism, Revolution, the nature of freedom and the faculties of thought and judgment. The question with which Arendt engages most frequently is the nature of politics

Altruism and Group Selection Ever since Darwin created his theory of evolution in the nineteenth century, and especially since the nineteen sixties, scientists and philosophers of science have been intensely debating whether and how selection occurs at the level of the group. The debates over group selection maintain their vitality for several reasons: because group selection may explain the evolution of altruism; because “altruistic” traits—traits

Empirical Aesthetics Empirical aesthetics is a research area at the intersection of psychology and neuroscience that aims to understand how people experience, auswerten, and create objects aesthetically. Its central two questions are: How do we experience beauty? How do we experience art? In der Praxis, this means that empirical aesthetics studies (1) prototypically aesthetic responses, such as beauty or chills, und (2) responses to prototypically aesthetic

John Duns Scotus (1266–1308) John Duns Scotus, along with Bonaventure, Aquin, and Ockham, is one of the four great philosophers of High Scholasticism. His work is encyclopedic in scope, yet so detailed and nuanced that he earned the epithet “Subtle Doctor,” and no less a thinker than Ockham would praise his judgment as excelling all others in its subtlety. In opposition to the prevailing thought

Francis Hutcheson (1694—1745) Francis Hutcheson was an eighteenth-century Scottish philosopher whose meticulous writings and activities influenced life in Scotland, Great Britain, Europa, and even the newly formed North American colonies. For historians and political scientists, the emphasis has been on his theories of liberalism and political rights; for philosophers and psychologists, Hutcheson’s importance comes from his theories of human nature, which include an account of