This book pursues a strand in the history of thought – ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations – that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law – genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking – as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular – exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.

This book pursues a strand in the history of thought - ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations - that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law - genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, wit.

This book pursues a strand in the history of thought – ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations – that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law – genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking – as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular – exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.

This book offers an original philosophical perspective on exemplarity. Inspired by Wittgenstein’s later work and Derrida’s theory of deconstruction, it argues that examples are not static entities but rather oscillate between singular and universal moments. There is a broad consensus that exemplary cases mediate between singular instances and universal concepts or norms. In the first part of the book, Mácha contends that there is a kind of différance between singular examples and general exemplars or paradigms. Every example is, in part, also an exemplar, and vice versa. Furthermore, he develops a paracomplete approach to the logic of exemplarity, which allows us to say of an exemplar of X neither that it is an X nor that it is not an X. This paradox is structurally isomorphic to Russell’s paradox and can be addressed in similar ways. In the second part of the book, Mácha presents four historical studies that exemplify the ideas developed in the first part. This part begins with Plato’s Forms, understood as standards/paradigms, before considering Kant’s theory of reflective judgment as a general epistemological account of exemplarity. This is then followed by analyses of Hegel’s conceptual moment of particularity and Kuhn’s concept of paradigm. The book concludes by discussing the speculative hypothesis that all our knowledge is based on paradigms, which, following the logic of exemplarity, are neither true nor false. The Philosophy of Exemplarity will be of interest to scholars and advanced students working in philosophy of language, logic, history of philosophy, and literary theory.

Labyrinths of Exemplarity presents the first comprehensive, in-depth study of the problem of exemplarity—or how we move between the general and the particular in order to try to understand our world. The author's focus ranges from the most basic and fundamental issues of what examples are and where they come from to the complex key issues of how examples function in the discourses they inhabit and what this functioning tells us about the nature of examples or exemplarity itself. The problem is treated especially in connection to Rousseau and Aristotle, with reference to deconstruction (especially Derrida) and the range of Western metaphysics. Ultimately, a new theory of examples is offered, one not drawn from the assumptions made by earlier philosophers but rather from the usage and functioning of examples in philosophical discourse.

This book returns to the question at the center of our existence, a question that the narcissistic culture in which we are immersed systematically tends to remove: “Why?” The underlying thesis is that the answer must not be sought in success or social recognition, but in a “fragment of truth”, hidden somewhere inside each of us, which reveals itself only if we detach ourselves from our ego and its certainties. It is not, therefore, a matter of finding yet another philosophical theory of the meaning of existence, but rather of shedding light on the conditions under which such meaning can emerge. The author shows us that the ultimate source of our existential orientation lies in the affective sphere, and that the current crisis of orientation is derived from the atrophy of the process of affective maturation on a large scale, and from a lack of knowledge and experience about which techniques are best to reactivate it. We are like glowworms that had once unlearned how to illuminate and have since begun to hover around the magic lantern of the ascetic ideal, already criticized by Nietzsche, and then around neon advertising signs. We are glowworms that have forgotten that we have within our own affective structure a precious source of orientation. The basic thesis is that this source of orientation can be reactivated through the care of desire and practices of emotional sharing.

Philosophical Foundations of Precedent offers a broad, deep, and diverse range of philosophical investigations of the role of precedent in law, adjudication, and morality. The forty chapters present the work of a large and inclusive group of authors which comprises of well-established leaders in the discipline and new voices in legal philosophy. The magnitude of the resulting project is extraordinary, presenting a diverse array of innovative and creative philosophical investigations of the practice of adhering to past decisions, in law and allied fields of practical reasoning. And by the same token, the contributions elucidate the reasons that courts and other decision-makers may have for departing from what has been done before. The phenomena under investigation include the law and practice of common law and civil jurisdictions around the world. In addition to its fundamental relevance to common law jurisdictions, this work will be of broad and significant interest to theoretically minded audiences in continental Europe, Latin America, and Asia because it involves an extensive study of practices of precedent in civil law systems as well as common law systems.