Ontology of the Norm: Essays in the Philosophy of Human Rights

This book offers insights on how this universalizing process occurs. Since it is key to how human rights are forged and where the legitimacy and reality of these rights emerge from, it will be important to understand how the tradition of thinking about rights is implicitly connected to this idea. The universalizing process develops in a number of ways and this is seen throughout a tradition that has struggled to both define and justify the idea of human rights. In philosophy a proposition is understood as a topic found and expressed in sentential form. Further, its content can be evaluated in terms of truth and falsity. In fact, this is the core idea of the philosophical logos. Plato understood philosophy, as shown in the Sophist, in such a manner. This point of view argues that truth can be distinguished in and through the clarity and precision of a statement; there are, in other words, sentences that can be discerned and understood as true and that can be contrasted with those that are false. Yet at the same time, Plato worked with a dialogic presentation mode that has a generally strong tendency to work in the frame of a different as well as differentiating logic. This logic, or possibly the excision of logic itself, carries the reader on a sojourn of topics; one is led to wander, to posit, and to re-posit the positions that have been propositionally established.