Jennifer W. Primmer

I argue that there are two conceptions of ‘comprehensiveness’: 1) Raz’s strong conception whereby comprehensiveness entails supremacy, and 2) a weak conception whereby comprehensiveness does not entail supremacy. The latter is sufficient to distinguish legal and non-legal authorities, and unlike Raz’s notion of comprehensiveness, allows one to account for both intra-state forms of legality (e.g., the federal-provincial relation in Canada) and supra-state forms of legality (e.g., the European Union). Moreover, although it is ideal for legal systems to claim supremacy, it is not necessary – it is possible for legal systems to recognize as valid the norms of other legal systems.

In this paper, I explore how best to conceptualize the nature of alexithymia. I argue that the condition is best understood as a dimensional construct; as such, it is likely that there exist various degrees of alexithymia. Moreover, I explore the merits of two analogies that others have used to try to understand the nature of alexithymia: one characterizes the condition as an analogue of associative visual object agnosia, and the other characterizes it as the emotional equivalent of blindsight. I argue that the analogy with blindsight more adequately portrays the processing deficit involved in mild alexithymia, but that neither the analogy with blindsight nor the analogy with associative visual object agnosia is able to account for the deficit involved in severe alexithymia. Instead, I argue that the deficit involved in severe alexithymia is best understood through an analogy with apperceptive visual agnosia.