Thesis (doctoral)--Universiteit van Amsterdam, 2000. / DatabaseEbrary.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, San Diego, 2003. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 183-191).

published_or_final_version / Sociology / Master / Master of Philosophy

Thesis (MA)--University of Stellenbosch, 2005. / Bibliography. Also available via the Internet.

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This thesis claims that if law has a distinctive and genuine normative force, then it is thanks to the fact that law’s authority originates from a particular institutional layout that allows for a division of moral labour between legislation and adjudication. After establishing what the moral dimension of authority is a matter of, and how law’s normative force can be justified by reference to it, this thesis defends a comprehensive-moral account of law’s authority. In this respect, the thesis argues that the moral dimension of law’s authority can be highlighted well if we consider it as emerging through a morally meaningful institutional distinction between legislation and adjudication: the institutional profile of legislative authority and that of adjudicative authority differ from each other, in that each can be said to be underlain by its own evaluative standards. On the one hand, the particularity of legislative authority is a matter of its community-driven, forward-looking character and of its consensual structure; as well as of the declaratory nature and the agent-relative status of reasons issued by legislative provisions. On the other hand, adjudicative authority is distinctive because it has a litigant-driven, remedial character and employs an adversarial structure so that it accomplishes its impartial investigatory task through the issuance of agent-neutral reasons. So understood, the institutional profile of legislative authority is considered to be morally meaningful in the sense that it incorporates a rule-consequentialist and value-pluralist rationale; while that of adjudicative authority is taken to owe its own moral meaningfulness to the fact that it fosters reciprocity between litigants.

Which uses of the power to criminalise are misuses of that power? When, in other words, is an exercise of the power to create a criminal offence an exercise of that power which cannot be morally justified? This thesis seeks to provide one part of the answer, by addressing an aspect of the question little discussed by criminal law theorists. Thus it seeks not classes of conduct which it is impermissible to criminalise, nor classes of objective which offence-creators cannot permissibly pursue. Rather the thesis addresses the distinct issue of means – of how criminal offences (are set up to) bring about their creators’ objectives. It asks which means of achieving objectives it is impermissible to employ or make available, and how the power to criminalise must be used to avoid their employment or availability. In answering these questions the thesis distinguishes a number of types of criminal offence, by reference to the means by which the tokens of each (are set up to) achieve objectives. The argument is that to create tokens of these types is often to misuse power, because it is often to employ, or make available, impermissible means. This judgment of impermissibility is a function of a number of principles of political morality, some of which are developed at length in the course of the thesis. No single principle (or set of principles) is presented as an absolute limit on the power to criminalise; but each is part of a complete picture of how that power can permissibly be used, and contributes to vindicating the thesis defended within these pages. That thesis, to repeat, is that some uses of criminalisation are no better than misuses, on account of the means by which the resulting offences (are set up to) achieve their creators’ ends.

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Guided by the question of what does photography bring into being, 'Against Indexicality' is a proposition to rethink the foundation of the philosophy of photography - to rethink the supposed relation of truth between the photograph and the world. Taking Indexicality as a messy and convoluted conceptual field comprised of the notions of pointing, stillness, and fragmentation, this study works to untangle the three from each other, separately challenging each individual notion. In analysing each of the three through their conceptualisation by prominent thinkers, including Charles S. Peirce, Susan Sontag, Henri Bergson, Walter Benjamin, André Bazin, Rosalind Krauss, Jacques Derrida, and Roland Barthes, and examining them against and through examples of photographic images, this study points to the imprecisions, insufficiencies, and incompatibilities of Indexicality in relation to the photographic image and form. Undoing Indexicality as a field, this study resists Indexicality as a paradigm, proposing a new theoretical framework for photography: rather than looking at photographic images as truth bearers that can evidence the photographed, it proposes to look at photographic images as formations that form a thought out of the photographed. In that, this study works to remedy the Indexicality fever, or compulsion, which it identifies as the root cause of theoretical mess within the philosophy of photography. By evincing that Indexicality is a wrong, albeit necessary, solution to a problem that is to do with identifying the relation of the photograph to the world, it not only lifts photography out of a Procrustean bed in which it was never comfortable, but also allows for a new solution to develop. This solution is the theory of photo-poiesis: a move beyond the materiality and away from the referentiality of photography towards its being in the world and the thought that it forms and brings-forth - towards thinking.