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Philosophy of Law$
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John Finnis

Print publication date: 2011

Print ISBN-13: 9780199580088

Published to Oxford Scholarship Online: September 2011

DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580088.001.0001

Individuals, Communities, and Postmodernism: Some Notes

Chapter:
(p. 327 ) 15 Individuals, Communities, and Postmodernism: Some Notes
Source:
Philosophy of Law
Author(s):

John Finnis

Publisher:
Oxford University Press
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199580088.003.0016

This chapter offers a brief discussion of a draft paper by Daniel Ortiz, focusing on whether individuals or communities should be the unit of political and social analysis. It is hazardous to discuss this in terms of individual ‘sovereignty’. Better analyses of the relation between individual and group are available, and talk of sovereignty systematically obscures the distinction between ‘is’ and ‘ought’.Nor is the category of ‘contradiction’ very appropriate for considering, even clearly normatively, that relation. Some observations are offered about Duncan Kennedy, Dworkin, Richard Rorty, and Whitman's pantheism and apparent optimism about reason and spirit.

Keywords:   postmodernism, Duncan Kennedy, Rorty, Dworkin, Whitman, units of social analysis, contradiction, sovereignty

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