Essays on Comtemporary Philosophy of Human Rights

Philosophical Dimensions of Human Rights:
Some Contemporary Views

Ed. by Claudio Corradetti

(Springer Verlag, 2012)





Description

This book presents a unique collection of the most relevant perspectives in contemporary human rights philosophy. Different intellectual traditions are brought together to explore some of the core postmodern issues challenging standard justifications. Widely accessible also to non experts, contributions aim at opening new perspectives on the state of the art of the philosophy of human rights. This makes this book particularly suitable to human rights experts as well as master and doctoral students.
Further, while conceived in a uniform and homogeneous way, the book is internally organized around three central themes: an introduction to theories of rights and their relation to values; a set of contributions presenting some of the most influential contemporary strategies; and finally a number of articles evaluating those empirical challenges springing from the implementation of human rights. This specific set-up of the book provides readers with a stimulating presentation of a growing and interconnecting number of problems that post-natural law theories face today.

Content [Preview]

Introduction - Claudio Corradetti

Part 1: Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Human Rights

1. Human Rights in History and Contemporary Practice - Jeffrey Flynn
2. Philosophy and Human Rights: Contemporary Perspectives - David Reidy
3. Reconsidering Realism on Rights - William E. Scheuerman

Part 2: The Validit(ies) of Human Rights

4. The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights - Jürgen Habermas [Abstract]
5. The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification - Rainer Forst
6. Social Harm, Political Judgment, and the Pragmatics of Justification - Albena Azmanova
7. “It All Depends”: The Universal and the Contingent in Human Rights - Wojciech Sadurski
8. Tiny Sparks of Contingency. On the Aesthetics of Human Rights - Giovanna Borradori
9. The Idea of a Charter of Fundamental Human Rights - Alessandro Ferrara

Part 3: Democracy and Human Rights

10. Is There a Human Right to Democracy? - Seyla Benhabib
11. Dialectical Snares: Human Rights and Democracy in the World Society - Hauke Brunkhorst
12. The Normality of Constitutional Politics: an Analysis of the Drafting of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights - Richard Bellamy & Justus Schönlau
13. Rights in Progress: The Politics of Rights and the Democracy-Building Processes in Comparative Perspective - Lorella Cedroni
14. Ethnopolitics. The Challenge for Human and Minority Rights Protection - Joseph Marko

15. Human Rights in the Information Society - Giovanni Sartor

Claudio Corradetti is Senior Researcher at The European Academy of Bozen/Bolzano (EURAC). He is the author of "Relativism and Human Rights. A Theory of Pluralistic Universalism" (Springer Verlag, 2009)