R. Michael Perry

Izhak Englard, a prominent tort scholar and a former justice of the Supreme Court of Israel, has dedicated the last few years to an unprecedented research project, aimed to “retrace the long and complex history of the Aristotelian conceptual distinction between distributive and corrective justice from antiquity to the present day.” Modern legal theorists are well versed in the Aristotelian concepts. But although these concepts have engaged “the most brilliant philosophical, legal, and theological minds for generations,” the millennial treatment of the Aristotelian distinction has been disregarded in recent times. Englard’s recently published book brings the cumulative knowledge to the attention of contemporary thinkers, offering an opportunity to enhance and deepen ongoing jurisprudential discourse.Englard has structured the book chronologically , on the grounds that a topical arrangement would be impractical due to its complexity. Nonetheless, one can break down his sequential analysis of discrete manuscripts and extract fascinating inter-temporal debates on concrete questions that have occupied the minds of Western thinkers for centuries. This Critical Notice focuses on one of the main themes that run throughout the book, and may be of the greatest importance to contemporary legal theorists, namely the place of retributive justice within the Aristotelian framework. Following a short presentation of the Aristotelian text, this Critical Notice utilizes Englard’s painstaking study to systematically evaluate four possible attitudes to the place of retributive justice vis-à-vis the Aristotelian forms: retribution is part of corrective justice ; retribution pertains to distributive justice ; retribution combines both forms of justice; retribution is a third form of justice

Anselm’s ontological argument for the existence of God is examined. It is concluded that Anselm errs in assuming the greatest "thing" must be a sentient being. The existence of God, then, is not established by Anselm’s argument, and is concluded to be unlikely for other reasons as well, one being that a perfected sentient being would be a logical impossibility. An afterlife and personal immortality are not precluded however; these goals could be reached by future scientific means. For now cryonics is advocated as a means to reach a more advanced future when death may be physically overcome

The viewpoint that consciousness, including feeling, could be fully expressed by a computational device is known as strong artificial intelligence or strong AI. Here I offer a defense of strong AI based on machine-state functionalism at the quantum level, or quantum-state functionalism. I consider arguments against strong AI, then summarize some counterarguments I find compelling, including Torkel Franzén’s work which challenges Roger Penrose’s claim, based on Gödel incompleteness, that mathematicians have nonalgorithmic levels of “certainty.” Some consequences of strong AI are then considered. A resolution is offered of some problems including John Searle’s Chinese Room problem and the problem of consciousness propagation under isomorphism.

In a celebrated article, published nearly a century ago, Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld endeavored to elucidate the various types of jural relations. Hohfeld’s scheme has been justly regarded as a seminal contribution to analytical jurisprudence, and has stimulated lively debate since. This Essay aims to refute one of Hohfeld’s fundamental and most influential theses: the axiom of right–duty correlativity. To do so, it employs the simplest refutation strategy in first-order logic, namely providing a valid counterexample. Part I discusses earlier attempts to do likewise, and explains why they failed. For the most part, previous illustrations of ostensibly standalone rights or standalone duties neglected relevant parties who could owe the correlative duties or hold the correlative rights, respectively. Part II puts forward a simple argument: There are abstract duties in private law that ban certain types of conduct without reference to specific victims. Those duties are not necessarily correlative with rights, although their breach may generate secondary duties with corresponding rights. In particular, tort law allows plaintiffs to recover for harm caused by breach of duty that occurred before they acquired legal personality. This is tantamount to recognizing duties that are not correlative with rights, and therefore invalidates the correlativity axiom.