About
Education: PhD, Birkbeck, University of London; MA Legal & Political Theory (with Distinction), University College London; MA Hons Religious Studies (First Class Honours), University of Edinburgh.
Doctorate awarded 31st Jan 2011 from Birkbeck, University of London.
Examiners: Prof. Dr Christoph Menke (Frankfurt) & Dr Simon Glendinning (LSE)
Supervisor: Dr Anton Schütz
A Critical Defence of the Rule of Law?
This thesis unfolds a novel concept of the Rule of Law as an example of a critical theoretical practice that is not self-defeating. The thesis argues that both the Rule of Law as it is, and the state of the question of legal critique and deconstruction as configured in the law-relevant work of Derrida and Agamben, are vulnerable, to a degree that has not hitherto been admitted, to the long history of sceptical thought, more specifically to its most radical and sophisticated form, known throughout Antiquity and the Early Modern period as Pyrrhonian scepticism. Its interrogation confronts lawyers and philosophers alike with the question of what can be expected from legal and political reason. A philosophical problem for all normative endeavours is that reasons underpinning norms appear to cease being effective under conditions of increased normative complexity. Two millennia ago Pyrrhonians observed that where there is difference and disagreement the giving and taking of reasons, and the justification of norms, become self-defeating. Any justification fails as a result of infinite regress, circularity, or dogmatism. This insight was formalised into the Five Modes of Agrippa. The thesis explores the continuing relevance and deconstructive power of these Five Modes. In their light a Pyrrhonian thinking of Right is reconstructed. Many of the innovations associated with modern critical thought are shown to have been anticipated in the writings of Sextus Empiricus, namely: zetetic dialectic (immanent critique), ephectic phenomenology, and self-cancelling expression (deconstruction). But greater sensitivity to the aporetic currents of reason gives reconstructed Pyrrhonian thought a coherence and discipline that is lacking in its more recent rivals. The result is a way of provisionally justifying norms that is not riven by unnecessary aporia and contradiction. As an example of this way a conception of the Rule of Law as a Rule of Aporetic Reason is offered.
