Diss.--Bielefeld, 1999. / Bibliogr. p. 326-336. Index.

Heidelberg, Univ., Diss., 2008. / Online publiziert: 2009.

Éd. partielle de: Th.--Lettres--Fribourg, Suisse, 1971.

Tese de livre-docência--Departamento de filosofia--São Paulo--Universidade de São Paulo, 1965.

Issued also as thesis (Ph. D.) Columbia University. / Bibliography: p. 229-248.

Inaug.-Diss.--Hamburg. / Lebenslauf. "Litteratur": p. ii-iii.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duquesne University, 2005. / Title from document title page. Abstract included in electronic submission form. Includes bibliographical references (p. 203-209) and index.

This thesis elaborates a notion of Bergsonian personhood that is particularly well suited for understanding the corporate person. Personalists have contributed much to the study of personhood, but they also fail to fully embrace the image of the embodied person offered by Bergson, from which their work appears to emerge. My concern for freedom is part of what animates this study, but I am not framing a new theory of freedom. Rather, I am trying to bring a broader conception of what freedom means to bear on the subject of personhood. To this end, I present the work of Bergson. I distinguish the terms ‘self’ and ‘person,’ defending self as being more properly outlined by the subjective and fleeting nature of the individual. Then, I discuss Bergson’s connections to personalism, with particular attention to the tradition that grew out of Boston University at the turn of the 20th century. Finally, I give a Bergsonian account of personhood that emphasizes the self’s freedom of creative expression, richly connected to its environment, which is elaborated over time in a movement of becoming personal. I make the case that Bergson’s treatments of self and person greatly aid our investigations into personhood socially, legally, and philosophically.

This thesis claims that temporality can provide a novel means through which to distinguish between different types of judgment. Specifically, it focusses upon how the adjudicative process determines factual construction and argues that the resultant construction is, at least in part, contingent upon temporality. As the first of two starting points, the thesis begins by rejecting the subsumption thesis of judgment which states laws simply subsume facts that they ‘correspond to’. It attributes this rejection to the generality of laws and their flexibility as either rules or standards. Second of the two starting points, though related to the first, is what the thesis refers to as the ‘Kantian axiom’ which argues that time shapes consciousness. Extending this, the thesis posits that, filling in the lacuna created by the shortcomings of the subsumptive theory of judgment, adjudication’s temporality shapes its factual construction. Having established these preliminary points, the thesis describes the different ends of a spectrum of judgment in which legal decisions can tend toward. Adjudication as Cognition (abstract judgment), predicated I argue on a spatial-temporality at one end, and Adjudication as Understanding (concrete judgment), grounded on a creative reading of Bergsonian and Gadamerian temporality at the other. The main differences between these forms of judgment is the qualitatively different types of fact they produce, made possible through the temporalities upon which they are contingent. This results in different constructions of the subject and event (facts which law gives meaning to) which may impact upon ascriptions of responsibility. In addition, it is with adjudication as understanding that a potentially transformative form of judgment is possible and in which the radical difference of the subject and event of law emerges. Temporality is thus capable of reframing old problems of jurisprudence as well as articulating new ones. It argues that factual construction, in particular subjectivity is, in part, predicated upon time, and that temporality, as unproblematised, may conceal an exercise of judicial power. It also highlights the general marginalisation of temporality in (legal) modernity and reveals the ‘temporal trap’ of legal subjectivity in which futures are bound and pasts are arbitrarily selected.

In this dissertation I argue that, contrary to apparent experience and contrary to many inherited traditions, time is not ontologically linear. As a complement to this argument, I identify a genealogy of implicit non-linear aspects of the theories of significant Western philosophers of time. This genealogy constitutes an iterative argument that culminates in the work of Henri Bergson and Martin Heidegger. Within their philosophies, I identify time as ontologically intensive, as opposed to the inherited tradition of spatializing—and therefore rendering extensive—time. The key component of this argument is ontological intensity—that the being of time itself resists articulation in language or conceptual schemes characterized by systems of mutual, external relations. Instead, I argue that time is best understood by reference to pre-articulate logos. Such pre-articulate logos is both intensive and ontologically (synoptically) plural. The dissertation comes to rest in the position that time is the becoming of pre-spatial, intensive ontology. Accordingly, the dissertation’s genealogy concludes in pluralistic rest, then, with the assertion that temporal ontology—real time—can be collected under the conceptual aegis of non-linearity.