Date: Wed, 26 Jan 2000 08:01:03 -0600
From: John Peterson <jvpeters-AT-midway.uchicago.edu>
Subject: Re: Thanks! Re: HAB: new stuff


Hi, Gary--No need to ask me twice: You know I'll take most any chance to
spout off.  I've only done an initial skim of the _Ratio Juris_ issue, so I
can't really "review" much in an evauative sense, but I can make some
mostly descriptive comments that might help folks decide if they want to
track this issue (12:4, Dec. '99) down.  I can do this easily at this point
since there's a editors intro, and RJ always prints abstracts at the start
of each article, and I've read Habermas's intro and reply.

The special issue's guest editor La Torre says in his intro that these
papers were presented in a conference in a villa in the Florentine hills on
June 12-13, 1998.  Pretty nice.  It appears completely unrelated to the
1992 Cardozo conference which led to the 1998 _Habermas on Law and
Democracy: Critical Exchanges_ collection, although both are on law and two
authors (Alexy and Preuss contributed to both).

Habermas's introduction is a 7 page summary of 6 main themes of _Between
Facts and Norms_.  Along with his 1994 "Postscript" appended to BFN, this
provides very useful guidance to people who need some help seeing the
forest among the trees as they wade (bad mixed metaphor, I know)  through
BFN for the first time.  

Ota Weinberger, "Legal Validity, Acceptance of Law, Legitimacy. Some
Critical Comments and Constructive Proposals."  Habermas's main reply is
that Weinberger's empiricist approach to normative analysis flattens out
the distinction between rational acceptability and de facto acceptance.

John Finnis, "Natural Law and the Ethics of Discourse."  Back to Platonist
contemplation and strong moral realism.  He questions the morality/ethics
distinction and some comments by Habermas on abortion.

Robert Alexy, "The Special Case Thesis."  I wondered so I checked, and this
is a new article, continuing a debate within discourse theory over the
relation of law to morality which I thought had pretty much been
straightened out, as Alexy's thesis that legal reasoning is a species--or a
"specification," Gary :)--of "general practical discourse."  Once Alexy had
clarified that the latter was not moral reasoning (which would subordinate
law to morality) but something like new (D)--i.e., the metaprinciple at BFN
p. 107 or so--this became unobjectionable to Habermas.  Yet on it goes with
a new paper by Alexy, which I have not yet read.  Habermas's main response
is that he's still a bit unclear as to what Alexy means by "general
practical discourse."

Joshua Cohen, "Reflections on Habermas on Democracy."  My initial skim made
me wonder why Cohen simply accepts at face value Habermas's claim to still
be a "radical democrat"--which is highly contested these days (I'm just
saying it's an open question).  Those into the deliberative democracy
debate should look here.  Unfortunately, there is no reply to Cohen--my
guess is that Cohen was not at the conference and this paper is separate.

Same thing with Ulrich Preuss, "The Constitution of a European Democracy
and the Role of the Nation State."  This does not focus on Habermas per se,
but is a contribution to a debate in which Habermas is also participating
(and deals with clearly Habermasian themes--not to say he owns them, of
course).

The longest section in Habermas's short reply is devoted to Massimo La
Torre, the guest editor and apparently the conference organizer.  Maybe out
of modest, La Torre did not include his own paper, which is unfortunate
since at the very least it would have provided a context for Habermas's
remarks in reply to it.

Danilo Zolo, "A Cosmopolitan Philosophy of  International Law? A Realist
Approach?"  Habermas's reply contains a couple of pages on cosmopolitan law.

That's it for a first pass, Vic




At 08:16 PM 1/25/00 -0800, you wrote:
>Any review comments you can afford time to offer
>sometime about this would be appreciated, regarding
>whether the journal issue overtly tries to take off
>from where the Cardoza anthology leaves one (i.e.,
>_Democracy & Law_) or whether it's trying to introduce
>a new audience to Habermas's work.
>
>Gary
>
>--- john victor peterson
><jvpeters-AT-midway.uchicago.edu> wrote:
>> Hey, everyone, look what I just found:  The latest
>> issue of _Ratio Juris_,
>> Vol. 12, No. 4 (December 1999) is a special issue
>> (guest edited byMassimo
>> La Torre) on Habermas's philosophy of law.  There's
>> a short intro by
>> Habermas, articles by Ota Weinberger, John Finnis,
>> Robert Alexy,
>> Joshua Cohen, Ulrich Preuss, and Danilo Zolo, then
>> "A Short Reply" by
>> Habermas again.  Fun, fun fun!  --Vic
>> 
>> 
>> 
>> 
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