No / About a week after the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington, staff and students in the Department of Peace Studies at the University of Bradford met to begin discussing how the Department should respond. At one end of the spectrum was the conviction that the Department should publicly express a collective position. Both within and outside the Department, people were asking: What is the position of peace studies? At the other end, there was the equally strong conviction that it was both impossible and inappropriate for the Department to answer this question, that peace studies should provide a space for argument and debate about the complexities of the situation rather than presume a consensus that might not exist beyond a very general level. The first argument worried those who —justifiably —insist that intellectual freedom and debate is integral to academic activity. The latter disappointed those who —equally justifiably —expect peace studies to take a clear stance in favor of the values that constitute the very rationale of the discipline.

No / Jürgen Habermas's discourse ethics ¿ and within this framework, particularly the idea of 'moral discourses', which focuses on 'what is good for all' and is intended as a means of addressing situations where a shared substantive 'background consensus' does not exist or has broken down ¿ is premised on the assumption that participants attempt to engage with and persuade each other through reasoned argumentation. Where does this leave (potential) participants with strong religious convictions? In several recent publications, Habermas himself has started to reflect on this question. His reflections are motivated not least by (responses to) 11 September 2001. In this context, Habermas has suggested that those with secular commitments engage in a process of self-reflection about the meaning of secularisation, the losses involved in the questioning of religious world views, and the question of how we might respond to these losses. Yet while these reflections are interesting and suggestive, Habermas's framework, as it stands, cannot easily accommodate his own recognition of the need to overcome what he has called 'the rift of speechlessness' that threatens to divide religious and secular discourses. Against this background, I consider elements of William E. Connolly's recent reflections on Neuropolitics as one example of a body of work that suggests possible alternative responses to the challenges Habermas identifies ¿ and as a contribution that deserves to be taken seriously by those interested in the further development of discourse ethics and/or deliberative democracy.

O poder constituinte, tal como entendido pela teoria constitucionalista clássica, é definido como poder bruto, original, ilimitado e incondicionado, a partir do qual nasce o Estado e, por consequência, a ordem jurídica. Esse poder, definido como supraestatal, não encontra limites no direito e, nas concepções democráticas, é titularizado pelo povo soberano. Essa concepção teórica passa por uma releitura no trabalho, a fim de se definir o poder constituinte como poder comunicativo criador da norma constitucional, de aparição episódica, por meio do qual é possível filtrar os argumentos morais, ético-políticos e estratégicos expostos pelos cidadãos na esfera pública democrática, representativos de um modo de vida compartilhado que se impõe politicamente. De acordo com a releitura apresentada, os postulados da ilimitação material e da incondicionalidade do poder constituinte não se sustentam em face do paradigma da racionalidade comunicativa e dialogal. Na qualidade de momento de fundação e fundamentação da ordem constitucional, o poder constituinte precisa respeitar direitos pressupostos, garantidores da autonomia individual, e institucionalizar os procedimentos discursivos que viabilizam a reprodução do direito legítimo. Entendido como processo extraordinário, no qual os interesses e os valores permanecem latentes na sociedade, o exercício do poder constituinte representa um momento único para análise do discurso de fundamentação normativa, objeto central da tese. Associando-se fundamentação normativa com legitimidade política, nos termos da teoria democrática exposta por Jürgen Habermas, conclui-se que o cerne da legitimidade das ordens estatais organizadas democraticamente é a institucionalização de uma ordem jurídica fundamentada discursivamente por intermédio de um procedimento de deliberação pública, no qual todos os potenciais atingidos pela norma possam exprimir o seu assentimento. O poder constituinte, ao estruturar o estado, garante que o processo de formação da vontade e da opinião pública se estabilize e o consenso seja alcançado. / Constituent power, based on classical constitutional theory, is defined as raw, original, limitless and unconditional power, from which the state and, consequently, legal order are born. Such power, defined as supranational, knows no boundaries in the law and according to democratic notions it is held by the sovereign people. This thesis reexamines that theoretical conception in order to define constituent power as a communicative power which creates constitutional norm; it appears occasionally and it allows for a selection of moral, ethical-political and strategic arguments introduced by citizens in the public democratic sphere which represent a shared way of life that imposes itself politically. According to this reexamination, postulates of constituent powers material illimitation and unconditionality cannot resist to the paradigm of communicative and dialogical rationality. As the founding moment and grounds of constitutional order, constituent power must respect presupposed rights which guarantee individual autonomy and institutionalize discursive procedures which enable the reproduction of legitimate law. Understood as an extraordinary process in which interests and values remain latent in society, exercise of constituent power represents a unique moment to analyze the normative grounds discourse, the core issue of this thesis. Combining normative grounds and political legitimacy, in the terms of the democratic theory introduced by Jürgen Habermas, the conclusion is that the essence of legitimacy of democratically-organized state orders is the institutionalization of a legal order based discursively through a process of public deliberation, where all individuals potentially affected by the norm may express their consent. By structuring the state, constituting power ensures that the public will and opinion formation process will become stable and consensus will be reached.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-04-27T17:27:19Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Josue Candido da Silva.pdf: 1063552 bytes, checksum: a6bfa7ee3824db82b776781b18c21736 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2007-07-04 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas have shared the attempt to found ethics in terms of the philosophy of language, which they have called discourse ethics. Such an attempt aims to face the paradoxical situation posed by our times: on the one hand, the need for universal ethics that is, one that could be binding for all mankind has never been more urgent; however, on the other hand, the founding of universal ethics has never seemed more complex, even without future perspectives, than in the age of science. In order to tackle this paradox, we should resume the Kantian concept on the transcendental conditions of possibility and validity of science by means of discerning the transcendental status of language and of the linguistics community. According to Apel, the semiotics transformation of the transcendental logic operated by Charles Sanders Peirce substitutes the transcendental subject for a founding of inter-subjective validity based on the concept of communication community presupposed a priori throughout its argumentative process. This way, in our daily argumentative practices, there is already embodied the presumption of an ideal communication community as a regulatory principle that guides the argumentative practices of the real community. The idealcommunity acts also as a parameter that measures the progress achieved by the real community in terms of its increasing approximation to the ideal communication community. Such approximation does not aim to achieve Hegel s substitution of the concrete social ethics for a formal moral, but rather to search for historical mediations to overcome obstacles to universal ethics. The historical mediation above-mentioned involves the difficult dialectical relationship between utopia and factibility, that is, if a historical mediation between both of them is really possible or if this would only be a transcendental illusion of the utopical reasoning. This work aims to analyze the founding of the discourse ethics and the problem of its historical mediation / Karl-Otto Apel partilha com Jürgen Habermas a tentativa de fundamentar a ética em termos da filosofia da linguagem, o que denominam de ética do discurso. Tal proposta pretende enfrentar a situação paradoxal de nossa época: por um lado, a carência de uma ética universal, isto é, vinculadora para toda humanidade, nunca foi tão urgente, mas, por outro lado, a fundamentação de uma ética universal jamais parece ter sido tão complexa, e mesmo sem perspectiva, como na idade da ciência. O ponto de partida para enfrentar esse paradoxo é a retomada da questão kantiana sobre as condições transcendentais de possibilidade e validade de fundamentação do conhecimento através do discernimento quanto ao status transcendental da linguagem e da comunidade lingüística. Segundo Apel a transformação semiótica da lógica transcendental realizada por Charles S. Peirce, que substituiu o sujeito transcendental por uma fundamentação de validade intersubjetiva baseada no conceito de comunidade de comunicação pressuposto de forma a priori em todo processo argumentativo. Nesse sentido, em nossas práticas argumentativas cotidianas está sempre já pressuposta uma comunidade ideal de comunicação como princípio regulativo que orienta as práticas argumentativas da comunidade real. A comunidade ideal serve também como parâmetro para o progresso da comunidade real em sua aproximação cada vez maior da comunidade ideal de comunicação. Tal aproximação não visa realizar a pretensão hegeliana de uma substituição da ética social concreta pela moral formal, mas buscar mediações históricas de superação dos obstáculos à realização de uma ética universal. Tal mediação histórica envolve a difícil relação dialética entre utopia e factibilidade, ou seja, se uma mediação histórica entre ambas é realmente possível ou se seria apenas uma ilusão transcendental da razão utópica. A análise da fundamentação da ética do discurso e o problema de sua mediação histórica são temas do presente trabalho

O poder constituinte, tal como entendido pela teoria constitucionalista clássica, é definido como poder bruto, original, ilimitado e incondicionado, a partir do qual nasce o Estado e, por consequência, a ordem jurídica. Esse poder, definido como supraestatal, não encontra limites no direito e, nas concepções democráticas, é titularizado pelo povo soberano. Essa concepção teórica passa por uma releitura no trabalho, a fim de se definir o poder constituinte como poder comunicativo criador da norma constitucional, de aparição episódica, por meio do qual é possível filtrar os argumentos morais, ético-políticos e estratégicos expostos pelos cidadãos na esfera pública democrática, representativos de um modo de vida compartilhado que se impõe politicamente. De acordo com a releitura apresentada, os postulados da ilimitação material e da incondicionalidade do poder constituinte não se sustentam em face do paradigma da racionalidade comunicativa e dialogal. Na qualidade de momento de fundação e fundamentação da ordem constitucional, o poder constituinte precisa respeitar direitos pressupostos, garantidores da autonomia individual, e institucionalizar os procedimentos discursivos que viabilizam a reprodução do direito legítimo. Entendido como processo extraordinário, no qual os interesses e os valores permanecem latentes na sociedade, o exercício do poder constituinte representa um momento único para análise do discurso de fundamentação normativa, objeto central da tese. Associando-se fundamentação normativa com legitimidade política, nos termos da teoria democrática exposta por Jürgen Habermas, conclui-se que o cerne da legitimidade das ordens estatais organizadas democraticamente é a institucionalização de uma ordem jurídica fundamentada discursivamente por intermédio de um procedimento de deliberação pública, no qual todos os potenciais atingidos pela norma possam exprimir o seu assentimento. O poder constituinte, ao estruturar o estado, garante que o processo de formação da vontade e da opinião pública se estabilize e o consenso seja alcançado. / Constituent power, based on classical constitutional theory, is defined as raw, original, limitless and unconditional power, from which the state and, consequently, legal order are born. Such power, defined as supranational, knows no boundaries in the law and according to democratic notions it is held by the sovereign people. This thesis reexamines that theoretical conception in order to define constituent power as a communicative power which creates constitutional norm; it appears occasionally and it allows for a selection of moral, ethical-political and strategic arguments introduced by citizens in the public democratic sphere which represent a shared way of life that imposes itself politically. According to this reexamination, postulates of constituent powers material illimitation and unconditionality cannot resist to the paradigm of communicative and dialogical rationality. As the founding moment and grounds of constitutional order, constituent power must respect presupposed rights which guarantee individual autonomy and institutionalize discursive procedures which enable the reproduction of legitimate law. Understood as an extraordinary process in which interests and values remain latent in society, exercise of constituent power represents a unique moment to analyze the normative grounds discourse, the core issue of this thesis. Combining normative grounds and political legitimacy, in the terms of the democratic theory introduced by Jürgen Habermas, the conclusion is that the essence of legitimacy of democratically-organized state orders is the institutionalization of a legal order based discursively through a process of public deliberation, where all individuals potentially affected by the norm may express their consent. By structuring the state, constituting power ensures that the public will and opinion formation process will become stable and consensus will be reached.

In this paper, we discuss the bridging potential of “interspecies” solidarity between the often incommensurable ethics of care and justice. Indeed, we show that the Environmental Communication literature emphasizes feelings of care and compassion as vectors of responsibility taking for animals. But we also show that a growing field of Political Animal Rights suggest that such responsibility taking should instead be grounded in universalizable terms of justice. Our argument is that a dual conception of solidarity can bridge this divide: On the one hand, solidarity as a pre-political relation with animals and, on the other hand, as a political practice based on open public deliberation of universalizable claims to justice; that is, claims to justice advanced by human proxy representatives of vulnerable non-humans. Such a dual conception can both challenge and validate NGOs’ claims to “speak on behalf of animals” in policy following the Aarhus Convention, indeed underwriting the Convention by insights from internatural communication in solidarity as relation, and by subjecting it to rational scrutiny in mini-publics in solidary as practice.

La thèse produit une anthropologie du dialogue qui, outre l’observation des rencontres orales, reconnaît au texte de dialogue des moyens propres de construction de nos représentations de la communication. Elle ancre la pensée du dialogue dans l’analyse des formes visuelles des textes de dialogue. La recherche procède en trois étapes. La première problématise l’acte de description de l’objet « texte de dialogue », défini comme le côte à côte de fragments de textes, ou « diatextes », dont les instances d’énonciation sont différentes. La seconde décrit les formes d’organisation spatiale des textes de dialogue. La troisième étape explore la possibilité d’une phénoménologie du dialogue ancrée dans la plastique propre des textes de dialogue. La pratique du regard frotté aux formes diatextuelles en vient à accoucher de certaines conceptions de la communication – éthiques, systémiques, esthétiques – de sorte que ces modèles textuels intériorisés structurent notre pratique des conversations. / This thesis is designed to produce a theory of dialogue that does not only take into account the observation of face to face oral encounters, but also gives a chance to the written form of dialogues to build up some of our representations of communication. The purpose is to show how the way we think and talk about human dialogue depends upon some criteria of description embedded in the visual aspects of textual dialogues, ranging from theatre editions to email communications. The research is developed in three stages. The first one raises the question of how to describe an object such as a « textual dialogue », defined as the collage of textual fragments, called « diatexts », coming from different sources. The second stage fully describes the spatial organization of textual dialogues. The third stage explores the possibility of an anthropology of dialogue shaped by the plasticity of written dialogues. It argues that some of our ideas about communication – whether ethical, systemic, aesthetic or metaphysical – are influenced by the act of reading and looking at written dialogues taken as textual images. Thus, interiorized textual patterns may structure « natural » conversations.

In the 20th century, Critical Theory has been very influential on every discipline of social sciences including international relations. According to Critical IR Theory, traditional theories are problem solving and try to explain repetition and recurrence, rather than change / however, the main subject matter of an IR theory should be the change itself. The idea of change is also constitutive of Habermasian political thought. J&uuml / rgen Habermas, as a critical theorist, has developed the model of Deliberative Democracy to provoke a change in the political life of the Western countries towards a more ethical politics. According to Habermas, such a change will eliminate the legitimacy crisis occurred in Western democracies. Therefore, Habermas aims at strengthening the moral basis of democratic understanding in order to make masses participate actively in decision making processes. According to him, rational consensus must be at the centre of democracy, and it can be reached, only if every part of the deliberation has the opportunity to express their arguments equally. Once the idea of rational consensus becomes a regulative rule of democracy, it is possible to change the nature of politics, including international politics

Made available in DSpace on 2016-08-03T12:29:43Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 JoseBonato.pdf: 630490 bytes, checksum: 90d592cac568d2f7855e5bab00b4f202 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-04-03 / Coordenação de Aperfeiçoamento de Pessoal de Nível Superior / Este trabalho aborda os textos sobre a reforma do Código Florestal nos jornais Folha de S.Paulo e O Estado de S.Paulo entre maio de 2011 e junho de 2012 com o objetivo de descrever as características da cobertura dos dois jornais sobre o tema. Trata-se de uma pesquisa qualitativa, descritiva, documental e bibliográfica, na qual teorias da Análise do Discurso de linha francesa e o conceito de ética discursiva da teoria da ação comunicativa de Habermas serviram como subsídio à análise. O corpus se compõe de 80 textos, de um universo de 450 pesquisados. Constatou-se que os dois veículos endossaram o discurso de defesa da reforma, que foi o mesmo dos representantes do agronegócio. Mas suas redações atuaram de formas distintas. A da Folha foi influenciada pela linha editorial da empresa. A do Estadão se revelou mais independente e deu mais espaço para as vozes dos cientistas e ambientalistas, contrários à reforma. Com isso, atendeu aos pressupostos de uma ética discursiva.

When discussing any question in which a human being has a moral claim or a moral choice to make we need to address the justification of those claims and actions. Hence one can ask the question whether we can discuss a justification of moral judgments without having any specific knowledge about any corresponding fact or if it is possible to justify a moral judgment without having that kind of knowledge. This thesis has critically assessed Rainer Forst’s justification theory in relation to moral epistemology, aiming at clarifying his position on the matter. The study shows that Forst’s position is one of a cognitivist nature with a form of rational constructivism. The thesis suggests an alternative approach to Forst’s justification theory. Forst should take on an empiricist explanation when it comes to justifying moral judgements and therefore an epistemology that is not rationalism. Therefore, I suggest a form of realism when it comes to the discussion of his ontology.