On Nomos and the Meaning of Philosophy in Law: an interview

Thanos Zartaloudis' The Birth of Nomos is bold and breathtaking. The reading heretofore offered aims to advance a constructive reading and arrangement of the work, to further highlight some of its force and arguments, towards indicating, in particular, its significance vis-à-vis the effectuality that sustains and surrounds the word Law. In addition, following the book's indebtedness, in part, to the work and thought of Giorgio Agamben, we advance a reading that explores how this influence informs the research protocols employed in The Birth of Nomos, and, moreover, what are some of the many speculative projections which may be further pursued taking as their point of departure Zartaloudis' scholarship. To do so, we undertake a careful reading of certain parts of the book, positioning it towards both Zartaloudis earlier work, as well as Giorgio Agamben's oeuvre.

SSRN Electronic Journal, 2021

Perhaps, this is particularly true for a German philosophical tradition that stretches from Schelling, Hegel and Hölderlin via Nietzsche and Heidegger to Adorno, Strauss, Arendt and many others. In all their differences, these thinkers all share the idea that the problems of modernity should somehow be confronted by reconsidering the ancient Greek tradition and rethinking our relation to it. See,

Krytyka Prawa, 2020

It is a widespread opinion that modern jurisprudence was shaped first of all by the tradition of Roman law. In this article author tries to explain why ancient Greek legal thought should be equally important. As an example he considers the evolu tion and the different meanings of the concept of nomos. Four issues are presented in this paper. First, nomos in the political philosophy of Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben. Secondly, nomos in one of Pindar's poems. Thirdly, the distinction be tween physis and nomos made by the sophists. Fourthly, thesmos, nomos and psephisma in the legislative practice of Athenian ekklesia.

I imagine that when Robert Cover's Nomos and Narrative essayl first reached the editors of the Harvard Law Review, their befuddlement derived not so mqch from Cover's framing of his review of the 1982 Supreme Court term with a philosophically opaque discussion of the interdependence of law and narrative, but from' the illustrations that he drew from biblical and rabbinic texts of ancient and medieval times. For Cover, both intellectually and as a matter of personal commitment, these ancient texts evoke a "nomian world," rooted more in communally shared stories of legal origins and utopian ends than in the brutalities of institutional enforcement, one from which modem legal theory and practice have much to learn and to emulate. Since my own head is buried most often in such ancient texts, rather than in modem courts, I thought it appropriate to reflect, by way of offering more such texts for our consideration, on the long-standing preoccupation with the intersection and interdependency of the discursive modes of law and narrative in Hebrew biblical and rabbiriic literature, without, I hope, romanticizing them. Indeed, I wish to demonstrate that what we might think of as a particularly modem tendency to separate law from narrative, has itself an ancient history, and to show how that tendency, while recurrent, was as recurrently resisted from within Jewish tradition. In particular, at those cultural turning points in which laws are extracted or codified from previous narrative settings, I hope to show that they are aiso renarrativized (or remythologized) so as to address, both ideologically and rhetorically, changed socio-historical settings. 2 I will do so through admittedly

Polis: The Journal for Ancient Greek and Roman Political Thought, 2024

In the Middle Ages, the idea of legislative sovereignty was expressed with reference to a host of commonplace arguments, such as pater legis, Sol Iustitiae, or lex animata. And many believe that it was the Roman legal concept of animate law which eventually laid the foundation for the elaboration of the idea of absolute power in the late Middle Ages. If this hypothesis is correct, the philosophic background of some late medieval and early modern absolutistic doctrines of political government could be sought after as early as the classical Greek descriptions of a king who is nomos empsychos, that is, a living law. In this article, I intend to consider this intellectual tradition, and raise some doubts about the merits of the above claim, arguing instead for a separate consideration of the individual sources of the nomos empsychos concept. As such, I am tracing the genealogy of the expression to the fifth-century Pythagorean, Archytas of Tarentum, and I am demonstrating that originally the nomos empsychos was inseparably associated with an intrinsically Archytean tradition.

Studies of Law and Narrative in the Discursive Worlds of Ancient Jewish Sectarians and Sages

Criminal Law and Philosophy, 2022

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with Tristan Webb Published first on CounterCurrents