Academic

Sherwin on Ethical Education

By Lawrence Solum

Richard K. Sherwin (New York Law School) has posted Sublime Jurisprudence: On the Ethical Education of the Legal Imagination in Our Time (Chicago-Kent Law Review, Vol. 83, No. 3, 2008) on SSRN. Here is the abstract:

The broad dissemination of digital communication technologies is raising disturbing questions about the nature of truth as representation. This epistemological crisis shares an uncanny affinity with the crisis of representation that lay at the heart of the baroque era during the 17th century in Europe. The resolution of that crisis, through the work of Descartes and others, came on the heels of a philosophical shift from the image to the sign. Not incidentally, that move was accompanied by significant political and juridical developments, including: the origin of legal positivism, the rise of conventionalism (or nominalism), the disenchantment of nature and the decline of natural law, and the emergence of the modern nation-state. The semiotic model today, however, is strained to the breaking point. Infinitely mutable digital signs proliferate as copies of copies; signifiers have been shorn of the signified. The ensuing mutation of the Cartesian sign into the digital image has been accompanied by significant political and juridical developments. Individual autonomy, universal reason, and calculative rationality - the traditional foundation for core Liberal values - are being challenged by digital practices. Like the baroque crisis of visuality that preceded it, the current crisis of the digital neo-baroque will not ease until confidence is restored not only in acceptable forms of truth as representation, but also in the mimetic faculty itself, which is to say, in the human capacity to represent self and others. 'Sublime jurisprudence' is a metaphysical model that seeks to address this need.

Full post as published by Legal Theory Blog on January 29, 2008 (boomark / email).