International Order, Political Community, and the Search for a Eurpoean Public Philosophy

The shaping of international order, and the place of concepts such as law and community within that order, has emerged as one of the most pressing issues in contemporary legal and political thought. This Essay examines three recent theses, each of which attempts to locate a public philosophy appropriate to the emerging new world order. Part I of this Essay takes a look at these theses: the orthodox Kantian theory of international relations, as recently articulated by Fernando Teson in A Philosophy of International Law, the liberal communitarian theory, which has been eloquently restated by Martha Nussbaum in Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education, and the institutional rationalism of Jurgen Habermas, as described in Between Facts and Norms: Contributions to a Discourse Theory of Law and Democracy.\u27 Part II of this Essay suggests that the disparity between these alternative theses can be situated within the post-Kantian attempt to determine the moral self within modern political communities. There are, in effect, two Kants: one, which we can term the formalist, and which has enjoyed dominion in Kantian theories of international law, and another, the communitarian, which has gained increasing currency in radical liberal political theory. The final part of this Essay then takes these theses and situates them within the specific context of the new European order

Trans-urban Networks of Learning, Mega Events and Policy Tourism: The Case of Manchester's Commonwealth and Olympic Games Projects

This paper argues for a rethinking of our understanding of what and where go into the ‘urban’ in the New Urban Politics (NUP). It contends that these issues have always been more complex, complicated and, most importantly, contested than has sometimes appeared to be the case in the literature. Using the example of one trans-urban policy learning network—that around the city of Manchester’s bids for the Olympic and Commonwealth Games—the paper makes the case for taking seriously the politics around comparison and referencing in making possible the NUP. It argues that there is a need to study the circuits, networks and webs in and through which urban knowledge and learning are constituted and moved around, and that often underpin the territorial outcomes that have been the traditional focus of scholars working on the NUP

Bringing the Voters Back In: A Canadian Model for Australia?

In 1993 federal elections were held in Australia and Canada alike. Whereas a complacent Australian media framed their coverage of the 1993 campaign in ways which cast voters in the role of passive consumers of politics, the Canadian news media experimented with various inclusive strategies which were intended to install ordinary Canadians at the very centre of their election coverage. The most publicised of these laudable experiments involved a series of television town hall meetings carried by the CBC's Prime Time news program. The Canadian media's innovative coverage demonstrates that it is possible to approach elections as something more than a contest between leaders and parties, and to see campaigns as a public discourse in which ordinary voters can be given a voice. It is in this sense that the media coverage of the 1993 Canadian election offers Australian news and current affairs journalists a model for a fresh, more inclusive and democratic approach to reporting election campaigns in this country

A genuinely free press?

Journalists need look again at the conventions and practices which conceal their reliance on information subsides from their audiences. A genuinely free and open press can only exist where readers can recognise where the hand of the government has helped in writing the news they read and watch.&nbsp

Hermeneutic Encounters: Hans-Georg Gadamer in North America, 1968-1986

Hans-Georg Gadamer’s myriad contributions to the continental philosophical tradition have been well documented, but his influence on North American intellectual life has gone largely gone unrecognized. This paper attempts to fill that gap, using primary and secondary source material to document Gadamer’s scholarly activities in the United States and Canada between 1968 and 1986. The paper also evaluates Gadamer’s influence using detailed accounts of “hermeneutic encounters” that occurred between Gadamer and four notable North American philosophers: Richard Palmer, Paul de Man, Charles Taylor, and Richard Rorty. Through these accounts, this paper argues that Gadamer made lasting contributions to ongoing debates in the humanities about the nature of literary interpretation, the social sciences, and analytic philosophy. Finally, the paper explores the philosophical and historiological possibilities that Gadamer’s hermeneutics opens up for intellectual history more broadly, especially in the field of reception history. Building on Gadamer’s own hermeneutics and Hans-Robert Jauss’s reception aesthetics, it develops the concept of the “encounter” as the starting point of a more hermeneutically-sensitive approach to intellectual history

Ovid’s Casebook: The Literary Jurisprudence of the Metamorphoses

Roman literature has, thus far, assumed a relatively modest place in the canon of literary jurisprudence. Yet it presents a rich resource for scholars interested, not just in Roman law, but in law today. This article will revisit Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a text which has continued to fascinate literary scholars since the Renaissance. It will suggest that Metamorphoses can be read as a ‘casebook’ in Roman law, and more especially the law relating to marriage and sexuality. At the same time, it will be argued that Ovid had a rather greater argument to make in regard to the broader sweep of Roman law. One of the key changes which he described in Metamorphoses is that which transformed Rome from a lawless to a lawful state. This article will trace this ‘metamorphosis’ by re-reading three of ‘cases’ discovered in Ovid’s epic; those of Tiresias, Philomela and Myrrha

Narrative Jurisprudence and Trans-National Justice

The purpose of this article is to explore this consonance in greater detail, and then to present two more particular examples of this narrative and poethic strategy. The first example is given by two attempts to provide some kind of juristic redress for the various atrocities suffered across southeast Europe during the successive Balkan wars of the 1990s. The second approaches the broader, and no less contemporary, experience of trans-national terrorism. In the first instance, the form of narrative, on both occasions, is that of a chronicle-a piece of extended journalism. In the second instance, the narrative is a more familiar piece of literature, a canon indeed of the modern novel-two rather different texts, but one common aspiration

Academic Cloud Computing Research: Five Pitfalls and Five Opportunities

This discussion paper argues that there are five fundamental pitfalls, which can restrict academics from conducting cloud computing research at the infrastructure level, which is currently where the vast majority of academic research lies. Instead academics should be conducting higher risk research, in order to gain understanding and open up entirely new areas. We call for a renewed mindset and argue that academic research should focus less upon physical infrastructure and embrace the abstractions provided by clouds through five opportunities: user driven research, new programming models, PaaS environments, and improved tools to support elasticity and large-scale debugging. The objective of this paper is to foster discussion, and to define a roadmap forward, which will allow academia to make longer-term impacts to the cloud computing community.Comment: Accepted and presented at the 6th USENIX Workshop on Hot Topics in Cloud Computing (HotCloud'14