Article
Judges as Readers, Authors and Dialecticians: Legal Interpretation in the ECtHR Cases on Mental Disability
The wording of major human rights texts—constitutions and international treaties—is very similar in those provisions, which guarantee everyone the right to family, privacy, protection against discrimination and arbitrary detention, and the right to access the court. However, judges of lower national courts, constitutional judges and judges of the European Court of Human Rights often read the same or seemingly the same texts differently. This difference in interpretation gives rise not only to disputes about the hierarchy of interpretative authorities, but to more general disputes about limits of judicial construction and validity of legal arguments. How it may happen, that the national courts, which apply constitutional provisions or provisions of national legislative acts, which are seemingly in compliance with the international human rights standards, come to different results with the international judges? Do they employ different interpretative techniques, share different values or develop different legal concepts? Do international judges ‘write’ rather than ‘read’ the text of the Convention? Who is, in Plato’s terms, a name-giver and who has a power to define the ‘correctness’ of names? The answers to these questions from the rhetorical and semiotic perspectives are exemplified by the texts of the judicial decisions on the rights of persons with mental disabilities. © 2015 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
This collector contains international conference papers on legal theories. Papaers are related to a problem of symbolic and attributive entity of law. This problem is tried to solve in perspectives of legal phylosophy, history, techniques as well as in perspective of different branches of law.
Collected papers may be of law researchers, teachers, postgraduates and students interest.
The article is devoted to a particular form of freedom of assembly — the right to counter-demonstrate. The author underlines the value of this right as an element of democratic society, but also acknowledges the risk of violent actions among participants of opposing demonstrations. Due to this risk, the government may adopt adequate measures restricting the right to counter-demonstrate, certain types of which are analyzed in this paper.
The paper offers an interpretation of Plato’s dialogue Gorgias in the context of post- Nietzschean political thought (M. Heidegger, L. Strauss, H. Arendt, G. Deleuze, M. Foucault). Each interlocutor of the dialogue claims that his speech is free. Two different political logics are introduced: «geometrical» (as in the conversation between Socrates and Polus) and «erotic» (as in the conversation between Socrates and Kallikles). The philosopher is able to make use of both languages. In the end, it is only Socrates who truly speaks freely, because philosophy doesn’t seek to be loyal to any of these two logics as it only aspires to solve a political collision between freedom and justice.
This article is devoted to conceptual translation of the terms "transcendence" and, connected with the former, "symbol". Difficulties which appear in the translation of those concepts into the language of contemporary culture are due to the fact that the terms are descriptive, not explanatory. This indicates a special type of ontology, that refers to Plato. Symbol, which is at the same time transcendent and immanent, will be analyzed through the examples of Merab Mamardashvili's philosophy and Andrey Tarkovsky's films. Their understanding of symbol is linked to Pavel Florensky's philosophy of art and Pseudo-Dionysius's theology of symbol.
The scope of this paper is to enquire into the nature of the so called ‘Socratic protreptic’. P. Harlich (1889) and K. Gaiser (1959) suggested that the ‘Socratic protreptic’ was a kind of transitional form from sophistic presentations to early Plato’s dialogues. Diogenus Laertius only mentions the protreptics of Antisthenes (VP VI. 2) and Aristippus (VP II. 85), but there are two texts that came to be considered as protreptics as a result оf Gaiser’s Protreptik und Paränese bei Platon: Xenophons’ Memorabilia 4.2 and the Alcibiades of Aeschines. These texts, along with the spurious First Alcibiades, were included into the protreptic corpus by S.R. Slings (1999). We argue that Gaiser’s approach is somewhat problematical, since the influence of Aeschines is not beyond any doubt. In the end, we focus on differences (both in structure and in content) between the ‘Socratic protreptic’ and those texts that were explicitly marked as protreptic in the IV century BC (Euthydemus, Clitiphon), which brings us to the problem of genre-definition.
The paper deals with the political sense of the dialectical method of Plato. Dialectics is often understood as a pure logical procedure. However the two forms of the dialectical discourse (mentioned in the “Phaedrus”) must be interpreted politically: the first one is a movement of freedom, the second one is a movement of justice. The paper offers a comparison of different conception of dialectics by Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Paul Ricoeur.
The description of the elenctic method in the Sophist (230a–e) is often believed to be merely retrospective. However, some parallels with Aristotle’s Sophistical refutations suggest that the dialogue as a whole has a clear elenctic dimension. Having faced an apparent refutation (falsehood paradox), the interlocutors find themselves in an impasse. According to Aristotle, to solve such aporiai one must eliminate ambiguity and homonymy by making distinctions, i.e. recur to the diairesis. The same tactics is applied by the Stranger and Theaetetus.
The article examines the main trends in the study of the Stalinist period and the phenomenon of Stalinism in connection with the mass opening of the archives.