Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies 2019

The Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies mirrors the annual activities of visiting fellows, staff, and affiliates of the Maimonides Centre of Advanced Studies - Jewish Scepticism, Universität Hamburg. Its main section contains scholarly articles about Judaism and scepticism, both individually and together, among different thinkers and within different areas of study. Each volume of the Yearbook also includes a section with an overview of the activities and events conducted at MCAS during a given academic year, as well as a report on its library

Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies. 2019

The Yearbook of the Maimonides Centre for Advanced Studies mirrors the annual activities of staff and visiting fellows of the Centre as well as scholars of the Institute for Jewish Philosophy and Religion at the University of Hamburg and reports on symposia, workshops, and lectures. Although aimed at a wider audience, the yearbook also contains academic articles and book reviews on scepticism in Judaism and scepticism in general

The World is an autology derived from all tautologies (2018)

We report a mathematical construction that is autological, universal and tautological. The autological property allows the derivation of the laws of physics from the construction, while the other two properties explain why the construction is universally and necessarily applicable to the world. The construction can explain the World at its most fundamental level up to and including the derivation of the familiar laws of physics. It is formulated as a statistical ensemble of feasible mathematics (an algorithmic information theory analog to statistical physics) and its domain is the set of all analytical statements of logic ---here they take the role of the permissible facts of the world. The familiar laws of physics are emergent from the ensemble as entropic laws; this includes special relativity, general relativity, dark energy, the Schrödinger equation, the Dirac equation, quantum field theory, the speed of light as a maximal speed, and the space-time background. Furthermore, the construction provides tentative solutions in regard to the quantum measurement problem, the unification of physics and the arrow of time. In this context, the laws of physics are interpreted as the limits applicable to the feasible verification of the elements of the set of all analytical facts (they limit the actual facts of the world). The scope is universal (applies to the whole world), it is constructed tautologically (is irrefutable) and it is autological (allows the derivation of the laws of physics) ---thus, it is a tentative final theory

Law, Politics and Paradox : Orientations in Legal Formalism

The aim of this dissertation is to analyze the significance of the logical phenomenon of paradox for law and its relation to politics. I examine a selection of formal legal and political theories that in different ways understand law as a totality of norms, communications or behaviors, how paradox emerges in these theories, and what implications their understanding of paradox has for the relationship between law and politics. I argue that these legal and political theories can be meaningfully and in a novel way grouped according to their orientation to legal totality and paradox. To my knowledge, there is no research systematically mapping orientations to paradox in legal theory. It is the objective of this dissertation to fill this lack. Paradox presents challenges for formal thought, i.e. thought that analyzes the logic of totalities. Law, considered as a totality or form, gathers a plurality of entities under a common denominator and into a legal order. It is in reflecting on such formalization that we encounter paradoxes. This work aims to contribute to a growing literature on the implications of formalism for contemporary social and political thought by providing a legal theoretical perspective hitherto missing in these discussions. I use as a heuristic device a grouping of formal thought presented by the philosopher Paul M. Livingston. According to this grouping, there are three main orientations in contemporary formal thought to totality: the constructivist-criteriological, the paradoxico-critical and the generic orientation. These orientations arise on grounds of the “metalogical choice”: they prefer to view totality (such as law as a system or order) either as complete but inconsistent (the paradoxico-criticism), or as consistent but incomplete (the constructivist-criteriological and the generic orientation). I will apply, and modify when necessary, this categorization in order to analyze the theories of Hans Kelsen, Niklas Luhmann, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou and Hans Lindahl, and to provide a systematic mapping of how the nature of law as a totality is understood in contemporary formal legal-political thought. Accounts of modern law encounter a paradox, I argue, if they observe law as an autonomous, self-referential totality that claims for itself the right to draw a distinction between itself and non-law. The paradox of autonomous law is that it cannot consistently show that it is itself legal as a totality. The basic problem that this implies is that the legal system or collective is unable to legitimate its existence and identity in response to challenges in any other way than by drawing on its own resources – which precisely is what the challenge targets in the first place. If we think of law as offering a framework within which questions of justice and injustice can be answered, the paradox emerges when we question the justice of this framework itself. The dissertation defends the paradoxico-critical orientation. It argues that the legal system is a paradoxical totality, which implies that there is no neutral metalanguage, such as natural law, that could solve the problem of law’s self-reference for good. This challenges legal theory to show how the problem of nihilistic relativism, the mere perpetuation of the self-referential legal system, can be mitigated and law’s normative authority in society rethought. In Chapter 1, I define the notion of paradox, explicate its meaning and role in formal thought and motivate its application to legal theory. In Chapter 2, I show that in his theory of the basic norm, Kelsen can be understood as oscillating between the constructivist-criteriological position and the paradoxico-criticism, between an attempt at guaranteeing legal order’s consistency in a metalanguage, i.e. legal science, and an acknowledgement of law as an inconsistent totality. In Chapter 3, I interpret Luhmann as a paradoxico-evolutionary thinker: he observes the legal system as constitutively inconsistent but emphasizes the ways in which the system seeks to make this inconsistency unproblematic for functional reasons. In Chapter 4, I show that in systems theory, just like in Kelsen’s pure theory, the politics of the paradox remains unarticulated. I also show that, for Agamben, a paradoxico-critical thinker, the paradoxical articulation of law and politics is exposed in the state of exception, which, in his analysis, has become the new normal, requiring “messianic” politics to deactivate the whole nihilistic sovereign-legal apparatus. For Badiou, the representative of the generic orientation, which I discuss in Chapter 5, what can be said within a language, and by implication a legal system, is pre-determined by that language. Politics, the desire to say the unsayable, is thrown fully outside the language and the legal system to a position from which law’s incompleteness, its incapacity to offer space for justice and politics, can only be disclosed. Both Agamben and Badiou, thus, think about politics as “post-juridical.” In Chapter 6, I show that the very inconsistency and paradox at the heart of the legal order is, for Lindahl’s paradoxico-criticism, the site of the politics of its limits. This dissertation, then, concludes that the paradoxical limits of the legal totality can be understood as the site of politics in law. Taking law’s paradox into account allows for a non-nihilistic conception of politically contestable law and legal authority.Väitöskirja selvittää paradoksin käsitteen merkitystä oikeudelle ja oikeuden ja politiikan väliselle suhteelle. Analysoin oikeusfilosofian alaan kuuluvassa tutkimuksessani, miten valikoimani oikeus- ja politiikan teoreetikot ymmärtävät oikeuden normeista, kommunikaatioista tai toiminnasta koostuvana kokonaisuutena, miten paradoksi ilmenee heidän teorioissaan ja mitä seurauksia sillä on heidän käsitykselleen oikeuden ja politiikan suhteesta. Väitän, että oikeus- ja politiikan teorian kenttää voi uudella tavalla hahmottaa selvittämällä suhtautumistapoja oikeuden paradoksiin. Aiemmin oikeusteoriassa ei ole systemaattisesti selvitetty käsityksiä oikeuden paradoksista, ja väitöskirjan tavoitteena on täyttää tämä aukko. Se osallistuu kasvavaan filosofiseen keskusteluun formaalin ajattelun merkityksestä yhteiskunta- ja poliittiselle teorialle ja tarjoaa oikeusteoreettisen näkökulman, joka keskustelusta vielä puuttuu. Paradoksi hahmottuu oikeusteoreettisena ongelmana, kun oikeutta teoretisoidaan kokonaisuutena eli oikeusjärjestyksenä. Käytän tutkimuksessani heuristisena apuna filosofi ja loogikko Paul M. Livingstonin kehittämää formaalin ajattelun jaottelua kolmeen, konstruktivistis-kriteriologiseen, paradoksis-kriittiseen ja geneeriseen suuntaukseen. Nämä suuntaukset käsittävät kokonaisuuksien luonteen eri tavoin ja siten tekevät erilaisen “metaloogisen valinnan”: ne käsittävät kokonaisuudet, kuten oikeuden systeeminä tai normijärjestyksenä, joko täydellisinä mutta paradoksaalisina tai konsistentteinä mutta epätäydellisinä. Sovellan tutkimuksessani tätä jaottelua ja analysoin sen avulla Hans Kelsenin, Niklas Luhmannin, Giorgio Agambenin, Alain Badioun ja Hans Lindahlin oikeus-poliittista ajattelua. Tavoitteena on systemaattisesti selvittää, miten nykyaikaisessa formaalissa oikeus-poliittisessa ajattelussa ymmärretään oikeuden luonne kokonaisuutena. Väitöskirja puolustaa paradoksis-kriittistä suuntausta. Väitän, että moderni oikeus voidaan ymmärtää paradoksaalisena, jos se käsitetään autonomisena, itseensä viittaavana kokonaisuutena, joka pidättää itselleen oikeuden vetää raja oikeuden ja ei-oikeuden välille. Autonomisen oikeuden paradoksi on se, ettei oikeusjärjestys pysty itse ristiriidattomasti oikeuttamaan itseään. Oikeusjärjestys mahdollistaa riidanratkaisun sekä oikean ja väärän, laillisen ja laittoman erottamisen toisistaan, mutta oikeuden yritykset ratkaista tarjoamansa riidanratkaisun oma oikeutus ja laillisuus johtavat paradoksiin. Seurauksena on, että oikeusjärjestelmä ja -yhteisö kykenee vastamaan kohtaamaansa kritiikkiin vain omasta näkökulmastaan, mikä juuri on kritiikin kohteena. Väitöskirjassa esitetään, että oikeusjärjestelmän ymmärtäminen paradoksaalisena kokonaisuutena merkitsee sekä ”metakielen”, kuten itsenäisen luonnonoikeuden, hylkäämistä ratkaisuna oikeuden itseensä viittaavuuden ongelmaan että luopumista täydellisen ja konsistentin oikeusjärjestyksen ideasta. Tästä seuraa, että oikeusteoria joutuu kohtaamaan oikeuden poliittisuuden, nihilistisen relativismin ongelman sekä etsimään uusia tapoja käsittää oikeuden normatiivisuus ja auktoriteetti yhteiskunnassa