Anna Irene Baka

The article examines how metaphor structures the conceptualization of human rights in modern European and Chinese legal and political thought, drawing on Paul Ricoeur’s account of metaphor as semantic innovation and hermeneutic refiguration. In European jurisprudence, rights are predominantly articulated through property and boundary metaphors—possession, scope, core, margin—while constitutional theory simultaneously deploys a generative register in which dignity and personhood function as grounding sources from which rights derive. In modern Chinese discourse, rights-language entered through translation and neologism, yet was progressively refigured through indigenous metaphorical constellations, most notably arboreal and hydrological imagery in which _renge_ (人格, personality) appears as root or source and rights as branches or flows. The article argues that these metaphors are not just rhetorical ornaments but symbolic mediations that disclose distinct normative orientations: bounded protection, correlativity, and adjudicability on the European side; developmental growth, relational embeddedness, and ethical cultivation in the Chinese context. Through a Ricoeurian analysis of distanciation, recontextualization, and surplus of meaning, the paper aims to show how rights-language detaches from its original configuration and is re-inscribed within new cultural horizons. The resulting differences do not entail incommensurability but exemplify transformative appropriation. Human rights thus emerge as a concept capable of cultural refiguration while retaining sufficient semantic continuity to sustain claims to universal articulation.

This article examines the relationship between law and political evil through a comparative analysis of Aristotelian and Confucian political philosophy, read in dialogue with anomie theory and modern accounts of legitimation crisis. It argues that, despite substantial differences in vocabulary and institutional emphasis, both traditions converge on a core claim: law and law-like regulation have a minimal but indispensable moral function, namely to inhibit the structural conditions under which political evil becomes stable, systematic, and socially reproducible. Against the modern tendency to portray law primarily as a neutral framework for pluralist coexistence, Aristotle and Confucian thinkers (especially Xunzi) treat law as a normative artefact whose legitimacy depends on its alignment with moral order and on the quality of judgment exercised by those who craft and apply it. The paper begins from a shared anthropological premise in both traditions, namely that human beings are improvable and that institutions play a formative role in directing or correcting human dispositions. In Aristotle, law (nomos) belongs to the political craft (technē) and supports habituation by restraining destructive impulses and securing the external conditions in which virtue can develop, even if law cannot by itself produce full virtue. In Confucianism, li (禮) provides the primary normative medium, understood not merely as ritual but as a comprehensive ethical grammar of roles, comportment, and social harmonization. Within this ecology, fa (法) functions in a subsidiary yet necessary capacity, ranging from standards and models of correction to, in later Legalist construals, codified penal statute. In both frameworks, political evil arises when the minimal formative function of law is corrupted or negated, whether through constitutional distortion, misdirected legislative craft, coercive misuse of norms, or the breakdown of ritual and linguistic propriety. Bringing these insights into contact with Durkheimian and Mertonian accounts of anomie and with Habermas’s analysis of legitimation crisis, the article shows how modern procedural legality may generate forms of deregulated normativity: legal systems can formally affirm rights and neutrality while materially reproducing asymmetry, exclusion, and social disorientation. The central conclusion is that legal neutrality toward good and evil is conceptually unstable. Law cannot create virtue, yet it must remain minimally responsible for inhibiting structural harm and safeguarding the conditions of human flourishing.

Phenomenology is a largely underexplored path for the conceptual clarification of legal meanings and the material reality that these meanings refer to. I suggest that Husserl’s phenomenology and particularly his building block ideas, the intentional act and the object of intentionality, are of utmost importance for any systematic theoretical attempt to ground Law and Rights in a non-relativistic fashion. That said, Husserl’s phenomenology faces certain important limitations, for according to the latter, it should be verified with absolute certainty the point where meaning-intention is fulfilled. Moreover, achieving a genetic grounding that is not overly static necessitates plugging in a phenomenology of Law, history, legal discourse, and the interpretation of human action. I argue that this corrective or supplementary step is effectively provided by Paul Ricoeur’s hermeneutics. According to the latter, one should always seek the author who takes responsibility for the text and its meaning. In the region of Law and Rights, this is effectuated at the level of adjudication, in the broadest sense, which is essentially a debate in words, and which brings the initial uncertainty and linguistic emptiness of Rights to a point of concreteness and presence, which is a speech act: the judgment of a judge-author. Largely influenced by Edith Stein’s work, I then put together some preliminary thoughts on the foundations of Law and Rights by appealing to the phenomenology of the State as the ultimate, positing source of bindingness, for I take as a working hypothesis that bindingness, rather than justice, constitutes the discipline’s fundamental positive predicate.

The first Chapter of the collective volume “The Phenomenology of Law and Normativity,” co-written by the three editors, Pedro Alves, Panos Theodorou, and Anna Irene Baka, introduces the volume and examines the concept of normativity, exploring its multi-dimensionality and its varied interpretations across philosophical traditions. Within the analytic tradition, the Chapter briefly refers to debates concerning the multiple senses and interpretations of normativity. Rather than the analytic tradition, however, the authors recognize a more robust connection of the phenomenology of normativity with other traditions as being on the side of neo-Kantianism. Then, the authors stress that the phenomenological perspective, particularly in recent literature, incorporates historical and existential dimensions, situating normativity within concrete human experiences and social interactions. In this context, there is a defense of the joint work of phenomenologists and philosophers of law and a reference to how this collaboration echoes the once strong link between ethics and law, especially in Modern Philosophy, as the two arms of moral philosophy. The Chapter -and the volume, in general-propose a phenomenology of normativity that focuses on its application to the social world, with law being a key albeit not unique component. In so doing, the Chapter reflects, not without some minor criticisms, the “normative turn” in phenomenology, which underscores the relevance of normativity across ethics, law, and social customs, enlightening us on its pervasive influence. Finally, the Chapter presents the volume’s structure, noting its division into four parts, each containing three chapters. This organization reflects the logical progression of the volume, gradually deepening the reader’s understanding of the interplay between normativity, law, and social realities.

Against the widespread, mainstream take on the philosophy of law, this collected volume fills an important scholarly gap by introducing a phenomenological account of some of the major questions and themes of jurisprudence such as rights and norms. This volume argues that wherever there is a demand for grounding normativity, the phenomenological method can provide a priori—albeit corrigible—access to essential truths, with reference to beings and their social relationships. The present work reflects upon the place and potential impact on the theory of law and normativity stemming from the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl—largely overlooked by legal philosophers and legal theorists. Further coverage contains those who have built upon these ideas of Husserl such as Martin Heidegger, Alfred Schutz, Edith Stein, Emmanuel Levinas, and Adolf Reinach. This text addresses new issues and questions from the general perspective of the phenomenology of law. It is a response to those critical of phenomenology by presenting sober arguments in support of its potential for achieving a deeper grasp of legal normative concepts such as rights, claims, obligations, promises, and apologies. Boundaries between law and morality as well as legal and social ontologies are approached from a phenomenological perspective. It appeals to students, researchers, and professionals working in phenomenology, ethics, legal philosophy, and human rights theory and practice.

Analytical jurisprudence and the legal mainstream perceive legal rights in an interactionist fashion, pursuant to a right-obligation duality. The Paper suggests that this is principally because legal positivism and the analytical Anglo-Saxon legal tradition ground their theories on logical positivism and the Wittgensteinian premise that meaning is produced and asserted in social use, i.e. both consensually and contextually. The paper suggests that there is a surplus of meaning which exists beyond social use and which cannot be conceptualized within the sociolinguistic confines of Wittgenstein’s logic of language. This surplus of meaning corresponds to the essential core of legal rights, which, following Aristotle’s induction and philosophy of the essences, constitutes a necessary property and τὸ τί ἦν εἶναι of legal rights, namely a state of affairs or a state of being that cannot be altered without their necessary breach or, indeed, the negation of their very meaning. The Paper discusses the shortcomings of the Wittgensteinian approach and revisits the philosophical foundations of legal rights by employing Aristotle’s induction and theory of the essences, which the Paper connects to the phenomenological method and particularly Ricoeur’s hermeneutics and Husserl’s transcedental phenomenology. This is a process of abstraction and insight, which aspires to induce a rational revisiting of the general theory of legal rights and address the surplus of meaning that Wittgensteinian logic leaves semantically uncovered.

Neurophenomenology maintains that the intelligent behavior we recognize in living beings is based on the fact that they are intentionally directed toward and are embodied and embedded in a world, which they actively constitute. This is the way in which it understands the intentionality of the mind and its meaning-making essence. Meaning-making, however, presupposes organization and synthesis of sensed reality elements within a horizon of temporality. But whence is the opening-up of this horizon given to the living? Attempts have been made to “transplant” Husserl’s transcendental phenomenological analysis of temporality (“internal timeconsciousness”) into the neural infrastructure of living organisms. We critique the main available relevant views and proposals put forward, focusing on the problematic way in which they assimilate Husserl’s analysis of intentionality and temporality. After distinguishing the desiderative (ephetic) phenomena on different levels of organization of the living being, we develop the argument that temporality, in the sense of the temporal horizon of lived time, is rooted in the deepest desiderative phenomenon, that of primordial orexis. Primordial orexis is directed not toward concrete or specific objects or sensory contents, but toward evolutionarily/survivally significant values. Then, we interpret Panksepp’s psychological and behavioral neuro-ethological findings regarding a SEEKING system in dopaminergic circuits in the subcortical frontal brain as an orectic value-seeking neural system and show that Panksepp’s results underpin our idea that such a system makes possible the opening-up of the primordial temporal horizon. As an application of the idea, we claim that primordial orexis (also) relates to truth or evidence as value and, in perception, conditions the meaning-giving process leading to the evident appearing of the perceptual object as a constitution that unfolds in the context of the orectically opened-up temporal horizon.