Tournament: Loyola | Round: 1 | Opponent: Tays KM | Judge: Abhinav Sinha
Derrida, Jacques Derrida, "Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority" Massa
But justice, however unpresentable it may be, doesn't wait.· It is that which must not wait. To be direct, simple and brief, let us say this: a just decision is always required immediately, "right away." It cannot furnish itself with infinite information and the unlimited knowledge of conditions, rules or hypothetical imperatives that could justify it. And even if it did have all that at its disposal, even if it did give itself the time, all the time and all the necessary facts about the matter, the moment of decision, as such, always remains a finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical knowledge, of this reflection or this deliberation, since it always marks the interruption of the juridico- or ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it. The instant of decision is a madness, says Kierkegaard. This is particularly true of the instant of the just decision that must rend time and defy dialectics. It is a madness. Even if time and prudence, the patience of knowledge and the mastery of conditions were hypothetically unlimited, the decision would be structurally finite, however late it came, decision of urgency and precipitation, acting in the night of non-knowledge and non-rule. Not of the absence of rules and knowledge but of a reinstitution of rules which by definition is not preceded by any knowledge or by any guarantee as such. If we were to trust in a massive and decisive distinction between performative and constative – a problem I can’t get involved in here – we would have to attribute this irreducibility of precipitate urgency, at the bottom this irreducibility of thoughtlessness and unconsciousness, however intelligent it may be, to the performative structure of speech act and acts in general as acts of justice or law, whether they be performatives that institute something or derived performatives supposing anterior conventions. A constative can be juste (right), in the sense of justesse, never in the sense of justice, except by founding itself on conventions and so on other anterior performatives, buried or not, it always maintains within itself some irruptive violence, it no longer responds to the demands of theoretical rationality. Since every constative utterance itself relies, at least implicitly, on a performative structure ("I tell you that, I speak to you, I address myself to you to tell you that this is true, that things are like this, I promise you or renew my promise to you to make a sentence and to sign what I say when I say that, tell you, or try to tell you the truth," and so forth), the dimension of justesse or truth of the theoretico-constatie utterances (in all domains, particularly in the deoman of the theory of law) always thus presupposes the dimension of justice of the performative utterances, that is to say their essential precipitation, which never proceeds without a certain dissymmetry and some quality of violence. That’s how I would be tempted to understand the proposition of Levinas, who, in a whole other language and following an entirely different discursive procedure, declares that "La Verite suppose la justice" ("Truth supposes justice") ("Verite et justice, in Totalite et infini 3, p. 62). Dangerously parodying the French idiom, we could end up saying: "La justice, y a qu’ca de vrai." This is not without consequence, needless to say, for the status, if we still can call it that, of truth.
Neta 14, Ram. "External World Skepticism." The Problem of The External World, 2014, philosophy.unc.edu/files/2014/06/The-Problem-of-the-External-World.pdf. Massa
You take yourself to know that you have hands. But notice that, if
AND
not such a brain, then you cannot know that you have hands.
Chapman 18, Andrew. "The Gettier Problem." 1000-Word Philosophy: An Introductory Anthology, 25 July 2018, 1000wordphilosophy.com/2014/04/10/the-gettier-problem Massa
First, the thought is that a person must believe something to in order to know it. It would seem contradictory to claim that Max knows, but that Max doesn’t believe, that his tennis racquet is in the closet. Second, it would seem contradictory to claim to Max knows that his tennis racquet is in the closet while his racquet is actually back at the court. Max might believe that his racquet is in the closet and be wrong. He might believe that he knows that his racquet is in the closet and be wrong. He might even have good evidence that his racquet is in the closet and nonetheless be wrong. In none of these cases would we say that Max knows where his racquet is, since what he believes is false. Finally, it seems as though Max needs some justification, evidence, or good reason to believe that his racquet is in the closet in order for him to know that it is.3 Suppose that Max has no good reason to believe that his racquet is in the closet. If Max just guesses that it’s in the closet, even if he serendipitously gets things right, it seems as though Max, while having a true belief, has an unjustified true belief, and hence, does not have knowledge.4