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The judgment view of higher lawmaking;(M. Hrubec: Commentary)Filosoficky Casopis 49 (1): 103-128. 2001.
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Engaging the later Rawls on legitimacyPhilosophy and Social Criticism. forthcoming.Frank Michelman’s recent book Constitutional Essentials. On the Constitutional Theory of Political Liberalism is discussed from a specific angle, related to how Rawls’s ‘deflection procedure’ – called by Michelman ‘justification by constitution’ – is affected by two recent innovations in the paradigm of political liberalism: first, the extension of reasonable pluralism to a family of liberal political conceptions of justice that coexist in a liberal-democratic society; second, the idea of legiti…Read more
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28If Foucault, why not Rawls? On enlarging the critical tentConstellations 30 (4): 401-405. 2023.Constellations, EarlyView.
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13. Narcissism and Critique: On Kohut’s Self PsychologyIn Amy Allen & Brian O'Connor (eds.), Transitional Subjects: Critical Theory and Object Relations, Columbia University Press. pp. 75-106. 2019.
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46Between transparency and surveillance: Politics of the secretPhilosophy and Social Criticism 42 (4-5): 456-464. 2016.The recent wave of whistleblowers and cyber-dissidents, from Julian Assange to Edward Snowden, has declared war against surveillance. In this context, transparency is presented as an attainable political goal that can be delivered in flesh and bones by spectacular and quasi-messianic moments of disclosure. The thesis of this article is that, despite its progressive promise, the project of releasing classified documents is in line with the Orwellian cold war trope of Big Brother rather than with …Read more
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6What the controversy over ‘the reasonable’ reveals: On Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte der PhilosophieSage Publications Ltd: Philosophy and Social Criticism 48 (3): 313-332. 2021.Philosophy & Social Criticism, Volume 48, Issue 3, Page 313-332, March 2022. This article discusses Jürgen Habermas’s latest book Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie from the specific angle of what the section on Rawls indicates about the overall philosophical project pursued by Habermas. This tiny element within the imposing architecture reveals a structural problem that affects Habermas’s program for a detranscendentalization of reason. After a general premise, Habermas’s appraisal of Rawls’s…Read more
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15In Praise of IštarLob der Ištar: Gebete und Ritual an die altbabylonische VenusgöttinIn Praise of IstarLob der Istar: Gebete und Ritual an die altbabylonische VenusgottinJournal of the American Oriental Society 120 (2): 199. 2000.
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23The Ethical Triage Dilemma: Who Should Receive Medical Care First; Is This the Right Question?Ratio Juris 36 (2): 178-190. 2023.In 2020, with the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic, academics and scientists began to question the triage criteria for allocating insufficient healthcare resources, trying to ethically justify the answer to the question, Who should receive medical care first? In this article, I will argue that even if we apply triage criteria, we won't be able to avoid the violation of human dignity or of the right to life and to health care. I will then suggest that, maybe, the real ethical triage dilemma lies…Read more
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Deconstructing the deconstruction of the law : reflections on Menke's "Law and violence"In Christoph Menke (ed.), Law and Violence: Chirstoph Menke in dialogue, Manchester University Press. 2018.
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15What the controversy over ‘the reasonable’ reveals: On Habermas’s Auch eine Geschichte der PhilosophiePhilosophy and Social Criticism 48 (3): 313-332. 2022.This article discusses Jürgen Habermas’s latest book Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie from the specific angle of what the section on Rawls indicates about the overall philosophical project pursued by Habermas. This tiny element within the imposing architecture reveals a structural problem that affects Habermas’s program for a detranscendentalization of reason. After a general premise, Habermas’s appraisal of Rawls’s work is reconstructed and critically examined. Then, in the guise of a Rawls…Read more
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28Ferrajoli’s Argument for Structural EntrenchmentRes Publica 17 (4): 377-383. 2011.This paper engages with Ferrajoli’s contribution to the philosophical debate on constitutional democracy and in particular his conception of ‘structural entrenchment’, or the basis upon which one can defend the normativity of the Constitution as ‘higher law’, which can trump or limit legislation, without infringing democratic principles. Ferrajoli’s own understanding of ‘structural entrenchment’ is compared to Rawls’s and Dworkin’s arguments in support of it. Ferrajoli’s position is neither grou…Read more
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59The separation of religion and politics in a post-secular societyPhilosophy and Social Criticism 35 (1-2): 77-91. 2009.This article examines recent theories of democratic citizenship as well as the institutional separation of religion and politics in light of shortcomings with the traditional secularization thesis. Due to the fact that juridical norms and forms of consciousness develop at a more rapid pace than religious ones, received accounts of both democratic equality and toleration need to be reconceptualized. Questions concerning the legitimacy and neutrality of religious reasoning in democratic politics, …Read more
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82Reflective authenticity: rethinking the project of modernityRoutledge. 1998.As people look for a way to ground their judgments of moral, political, aesthetic claims in the face of the postmodernists who claim nothing can be grounded, Reflective Authenticity attempts to rescue some of the critical ideals of the Enlightenment without falling prey to those who say that the Enlightenment's tenets of objectivity, reason, liberalism makes this impossible and in the face of multiculturalism, difference, and the death of subject, are outdated. Alessandro Ferrara suggests that t…Read more
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63Does Kant share Sancho's dream?: Judgment and sensus communisPhilosophy and Social Criticism 34 (1-2): 65-81. 2008.In this paper the notion of sensus communis, as articulated by Kant in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, is discussed from the vantage point of the author's project of exporting the model of exemplary universalism underlying reflective and, specifically, aesthetic judgment beyond the realm of aesthetics. In the first section, the relevance of such a project relative to an appraisal of the new and unsuperseded philosophical context opened by the Linguistic Turn is elucidated. Then the centra…Read more
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The communicative paradigm in moral theoryIn David M. Rasmussen (ed.), Handbook of critical theory, Blackwell. pp. 119--37. 1996.
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28Varieties of Transcendence and Their Consequences for Political PhilosophyThe European Legacy 20 (2): 109-119. 2015.In this essay I argue that the notion of religious transcendence was a latecomer in human evolution. It did not appear before the Axial Age, and in its extreme form as a realm of ultimate meanings beyond human reach it had only a locally and temporally bounded existence. Once it appeared, however, the idea of religious transcendence set an evolutionary dynamic in motion, which soon led to various forms of “immanent transcendence,” starting from the “Papal Revolution” and continuing with the Refo…Read more
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7Reflexive pluralismPhilosophy and Social Criticism 36 (3-4): 353-364. 2010.Reflexive pluralism is here put forward as the conception that is most reasonable for supporters of political liberalism to hold at a period when the reasons justifying acceptance of political and religious pluralism seem inadequate.