Archive for March 2015
On philosophy as a photograph of nature
One of the things I appreciate about reformational philosophy is the rightful place it gives to our ordinary, naïve experience. Naïve experience does not mean in a pejorative sense, the gullibility of our experience of the everyday, but rather, it refers to the way in which human beings experience things in their seamless totality: Herman Dooyeweerd’s favorite box of Havana cigars, in ordinary experience, is a box of Havana cigars, in the concreteness of reality. But the moment we confront it with theoretical thought, we start abstracting from it certain of its various sides: the aesthetics, the legal, the economic, the social, the historical, and so on. Naïve experience is not dismissed, but properly accounted for, as part of the the task of theorizing about reality.
Thus, in his first major work, Encyclopedia of the Science of Law, he criticizes what Richard Rorty would call the view of…
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Filipino human rights group brings case of detained Thai poet to UN body
The Manila-based free expression advocacy group Center for International Law asked the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention Wednesday to press the Thai Royal Government to free a Thai poet and blogger being tried by a military tribunal for writing articles that allegedly insulted King Bhumibol Aduljadej.
The cyberactivist, the poet Sirapop Korn-A-Rut, has been detained at the Bangkok Remand prison since June 2014 and faces up to 45 years in prison under his country’s restrictive lèse majesté laws, or laws penalizing any publication deemed offensive to the Thai King.
“Sirapop has written about a wide range of issues dealing with the contemporary political and legal climate in his country, a brave act that cannot be honestly done without dealing with the institution of the Office of the King of Thailand,” said lawyers Harry Roque and Romel Regalado Bagares, chair and executive director, respectively, of CenterLaw. “In doing so, he…
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memory's sacred domain 