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Very Distinction (very + distinction)

Distribution by Scientific Domains

Humanities and Social Sciences	60%
Law and Criminology	40%

Selected Abstracts

Is Dialetheism an Idealism?

DIALECTICA, Issue 2 2007
The Russellian Fallacy, the Dialetheist's Dilemma
In his famous work on vagueness, Russell named ,fallacy of verbalism' the fallacy that consists in mistaking the properties of words for the properties of things. In this paper, I examine two (clusters of) mainstream paraconsistent logical theories , the non-adjunctive and relevant approaches ,, and show that, if they are given a strongly paraconsistent or dialetheic reading, the charge of committing the Russellian Fallacy can be raised against them in a sophisticated way, by appealing to the intuitive reading of their underlying semantics. The meaning of ,intuitive reading' is clarified by exploiting a well-established distinction between pure and applied semantics. If the proposed arguments go through, the dialetheist or strong paraconsistentist faces the following Dilemma: either she must withdraw her claim to have exhibited true contradictions in a metaphysically robust sense , therefore, inconsistent objects and/or states of affairs that make those contradictions true; or she has to give up realism on truth, and embrace some form of anti-realistic (idealistic, or broadly constructivist) metaphysics. Sticking to the second horn of the Dilemma, though, appears to be promising: it could lead to a collapse of the very distinction, commonly held in the literature, between a weak and a strong form of paraconsistency , and this could be a welcome result for a dialetheist. [source]

In the Interests of Clients or Commerce?

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2007
Demand, Ethical Indeterminacy' in Criminal Defence Work, Legal Aid, Supply
As a professional, a lawyer's first duty is to serve the client's best interests, before simple monetary gain. In criminal defence work, this duty has been questioned in the debate about the causes of growth in legal aid spending: is it driven by lawyers (suppliers) inducing unnecessary demand for their services or are they merely responding to increased demand? Research reported here found clear evidence of a change in the handling of cases in response to new payment structures, though in ways unexpected by the policy's proponents. The paper develops the concept of ,ethical indeterminacy' as a way of understanding how defence lawyers seek to reconcile the interests of commerce and clients. Ethical indeterminacy suggests that where different courses of action could each be said to benefit the client, the lawyer will tend to advise the client to decide in the lawyer's own interests. Ethical indeterminacy is mediated by a range of competing conceptions of ,quality' and ,need'. The paper goes on to question the very distinction between ,supply' and ,demand' in the provision of legal services. [source]

Unapocalyptic Theology: History and Eschatology in Balthasar's Theo-Drama

MODERN THEOLOGY, Issue 2 2001
Steffen Lösel
In this essay, I evaluate the claim that Hans Urs von Balthasar's interpretation of trinitarian doctrine undermines the importance of history for the Christian God. Where other critics argue that the very distinction between immanent and economic Trinity robs the economy of salvation of theological significance, I contend that the underlying problem lies in how Balthasar restricts the theo-drama to an event between heaven and earth on the cross of Golgotha. Through this limitation of God's active involvement in history to a single event, Balthasar's theo-drama becomes an "unapocalyptic theology", which devalues God's salvific history with the world and the biblical expectation of an eschatological end of history. Furthermore, Balthasar underplays the messianic-political dimension of the Christian concept of salvation and thereby cements the status quo of a yet unredeemed world. [source]

A-Legality: Postnationalism and the Question of Legal Boundaries

THE MODERN LAW REVIEW, Issue 1 2010
Hans Lindahl
This paper critically examines the prevailing assumption that legal boundaries are becoming irrelevant in postnationalism. While the boundaries of the nation-state are forfeiting some of their hold on human behaviour, postnational legal orders are simply not legal orders unless they can in some way draw the spatial, temporal, material and subjective boundaries that make it possible to qualify human behaviour as legal or illegal. This implies that reflexively constituted legal orders , whether national or postnational , must be presented as legal unities. To the extent that boundaries are the necessary condition of national and postnational legal orders, and therewith of legal unity, they also spawn the possibility of political plurality, manifested in behaviour that resists the very distinction between legality and illegality, as drawn by an order of positive law: a-legality. Rather than signalling the demise of legal boundaries, postnationalism ushers in a novel way of dealing therewith , and with a-legality. [source]

Guilty Bodies, Productive Bodies, Destructive Bodies: Crossing the Biometric Borders

INTERNATIONAL POLITICAL SOCIOLOGY, Issue 2 2007
CHARLOTTE EPSTEIN
This article examines the forms of power brought into play by the deployment of biometrics under the lenses of Foucault's notions of discipline and biopower. These developments are then analyzed from the perspective of governmentality, highlighting how the broader spread of biometrics throughout the social fabric owes not merely to the convergence of public and private surveillance, but rather to a deeper logic of power under the governmental state, orchestrated by the security function, which ultimately strengthens the state. It is associated with the rise of a new governmentality discourse, which operates on a binary logic of productive/destructive, and where, in fact, the very distinctions between private and public, guilty, and innocent,classic categories of sovereignty,find decreasing currency. However, biometric borders reveal a complicated game of renegotiations between sovereignty and governmentality, whereby sovereignty is colonized by governmentality on the one hand, but still functions as a counterweight to it on the other. Furthermore, they bring out a particular function of the "destructive body" for the governmental state: it is both the key figure ruling the whole design of security management, and the blind spot, the inconceivable, for a form of power geared toward producing productive bodies. [source]