Richard Mohr
Biographic Data
| ID | 1354652 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Richard Mohr |
| GIVEN NAMES | Richard |
| FAMILY NAME | Mohr |
| SIGNATURE | MOHR R |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of Wollongong |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-2127-0440 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 33 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 6 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 33 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1977 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Condition Critical
The introduction to the ‘Condition Critical’ symposium explains the background to the series on the climatic and pandemic crises at the beginning of the 2020s. What is the role of the law in times of crisis? How does this force for continuity, predictability and order react to the discontinuity characteristic of disasters? The suspension of the law or its day-to-day operations is a moment of extreme danger, rivalling that of the disaster itself, …
Technologies of Individualism: Remaking Subjectivity in an Age of Crises
This article addresses the contrast between collective and individualistic responses to crises. While liberal individualism was instrumental in an environment of capitalist competition and free trade between states, it is dysfunctional in a world where global threats require cooperation and mutual consideration. To address this problem, the article investigates the forces that shape individualist subjectivity. These began in ideas, developed into…
When normality fails: Discursive reactions to disaster
Shocks from disasters challenge the normality of everyday life. Emotional and political reactions include anxiety and blame, but these must come together with knowledge through shared discourse to formulate responses, often immediate. The study draws on a phenomenological analysis of personal experience and discursive reactions to fires and the pandemic. It is informed by ethical and social approaches to epistemology and discourse, drawing on soc…
Norm, normal and disruption: Introductory notes
The eleven papers in this special issue analyze how different sources of disruption collide with normality, the consequences on individual, social and institutional life, and efforts to re-establish the old or to create a new normal. They arose from a series of online seminars in September and October 2020 investigating normality, disruption and normalization in the wake of the current environmental, technological, epidemiological and socio-econo…
Diversity or Displacement?: Housing capital and the right to place
Increasing costs of housing and processes of gentrification are excluding poorer people from convenient areas of cities where they have traditionally lived. This paper responds to the loss of diversity being experienced in part of inner western of Sydney which has been a first home for successive waves of immigrants. It considers claims to various rights and forms of capital as a possible foundation of resistance to gentrification and the commodi…
Law and Technology: Being Human in the World
The first four papers in this issue come out of a project examining the relations between law, culture and things. They inquire into human links with the material world. These links are mediated through technology which, in its many forms, enables humans to fulfil material needs. Tools and their social organisation provide food, clothing, shelter and communication. This deep imbrication with all facets of our lives means that the ways technology …
What Have We Done? Law, Responsibility and Technologies
The relationship between humans and the environment is becoming unsustainable. Technologies mediate this relationship. In turn, technology is a product of dense cultural phenomena, from research institutions to capitalism, from ethics to cosmology. This paper investigates the ‘cosmotechnics’ of technical interactions with the environment and explores the sources of these social, ethical and environmental problems. The disconnect between humans an…
Law and Argument for a Culturally Diverse World: How not to Communicate
This paper reviews the role of discourse in law and public life and identifies threats to the polity from malicious forms of communication. In addition to its role in legal argument, communication is fundamental to public debate in the formation of laws and policies, and it constitutes the social and political fabric through the use of forms of address and recognition of others. This argument builds on aspects of discourse theory and feminist and…
Crossing Over: Hosts, Guests and Tastes on a Sydney Street
Food and eating are material necessities of life and, at the same time, elaborate cultural and symbolic markers. Food is worked from the earth or killed and butchered, it is bought with money and it is masticated, swallowed, digested, and its waste products expelled. It is fundamentally, corporeally, even bestially physical. Yet food is also subject to rules, regulations and rituals that are complex and diverse. That diversity derives from a wide…
Signature and Illusion: Lessons from the Baroque for 'Truth' in Law, Arts and Humanities
Basic to contemporary problems in the disciplines of representation and interpretation is a split between a naïve acceptance of bare facts, presumed to exist in their own ‘objective’ world of objects, and the actions of subjects who interpret an intersubjective world. The solution is sought in some ‘new’ epistemologies: Martín Alcoff, Grosz, Kristeva, Butler, as well as in Benjamin and Gadamer, who look back to older ways of knowing. The methodol…
Reassembling the Legal: ‘The Wonders of Modern Science’ in Court-Related Proceedings
The article analyses the ways in which technology and law disperse, channel and reassemble agency in ICT-enabled legal proceedings. It works from case studies of online civil claims in England and Italy, and the automatically issued speed camera fine process in Australia. Information and communication technologies affect legal procedures in three dimensions: legitimacy, efficacy and performativity. The law can legitimate ensembles of technologica…
Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian Law in Black and White
This article critically analyses the concept of suffering, with particular emphasis on responsibility for and representations of suffering. Suffering is seen as a social relationship, with objective characteristics, classified by Renault as domination, deprivation and the weakening of intersubjective supports (désaffiliation). Veitch and Wolcher have inquired into legal responsibility for suffering. The author adds that suffering is also construc…
Flesh and the Person
What connection is there between flesh and the legal person? Flesh is the most material aspect of human existence, while the legal person is one of its most abstract manifestations. The method is a phenomenological analysis of legal records of the body and identity, including everyday documents such as credit cards. These are analysed in terms of the information they contain or refer to, and the physical processes by which they are compiled or ac…
Identity crisis: Judgment and the hollow legal subject
In this article I will be suggesting that there is a problem with the modern legal subject. There is something missing, a gap in the middle of that subjectivity, which clouds our judgment. This split had its origin in the Enlightenment, its first effect being the separation of knowing from doing. Our experience of the world could only be mediated through self-conscious sense data and thought, without our being in direct contact with the satisfact…
Festival Filosofia sui Sensi
Some Conditions for Culturally Diverse Deliberation
Cet article analyse les façons dont le raisonnement s'attache aux contextes culturels et pondère les fondements de la prise de décision dans une sorte de terrain commun ou dans une reconnaissance de la diversité. Il considère la critique féministe de l'éthique du discours selon Habermas et les efforts de Benhabib de réviser cette approche pour répondre à la diversité culturelle. Alors que la bonne volonté et de bonnes procédures peuvent certes cr…
Law and Identity in Spatial Contests
Law has had a traditional reference to land, conceived as territory, in the notion of a jurisdiction, where the law of the land applies equally to all individuals. Recent critiques of this view have suggested that a plurality of laws may apply in particular places. How this spatial pluralism impacts on dominant views of law is considered through two instances in which law has interacted with competing conceptions of place and territory in relatio…
Beyond the Bounds
The contributions to this edition of Law Text Culture arose from a series of workshops and seminars which Luke McNamara and I organised through the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of Wollongong during 2001 and 2002. Having recently formed a research group focusing on the social and disciplinary intersections of law, we set out to explore these intersections with the help of colleagues working in law, humanities and social sc…
From Oxymoron to Intersection: An Epidemiology of Legal Research
The foregoing articles about research in and around law reflect a broad conception of what it is to be a legal scholar. The views and experiences of the authors gathered here are probably no more radical or heterodox than those to be found in any of the earlier editions of this journal or the many others devoted to themes of law, society, culture and contemporary legal theory. Having brought these people together to reflect on what it is that the…
Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies
Aids, Gays, and State Coercion 1
Mohr argues that coercive government policies in response to the AIDS crisis are unjustified and pose a serious threat to the rights of homosexuals. AIDS presently can be transmitted only to those whose actions place them at risk. Paternalistic state coercion is warranted only when a person has diminished capacity or when necessary to prevent someone from ceasing to be an independent agent. Furthermore, an individual may regard sex as a central v…
The Platonic Cosmology
Plato on Time and Eternity
The World-Soul in the Platonic Cosmology
In each of Plato's major cosmological works, the Timaeus, the Statesman myth and the Philebus , he asserts that the body of the whole universe is alive and possesses a single World Soul which extends throughout it. I wish to offer a new in terpretation of the role of the World-Soul which gives the World-Soul a special function in the economy of the Platonic cosmology and which explains why Plato would place such re peated emphasis on the existenc…
Platonic cosmology
Law and Identity in Spatial Contests
Law has had a traditional reference to land, conceived as territory, in the notion of a jurisdiction, where the law of the land applies equally to all individuals. Recent critiques of this view have suggested that a plurality of laws may apply in particular places. How this spatial pluralism impacts on dominant views of law is considered through two instances in which law has interacted with competing conceptions of place and territory in relatio…
"Image, Flux, and Space in Plato's "Timaeus
H ERACLITUS WROTE THAT YOU CANNOT step into the same river twice for the waters are ever flowing new upon you (B49a, B12, B91, A6). We are told by Aristotle (Metaphysics 1010all-14) that Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, revised this slogan to read one cannot step into the same river even once, and then stopped talking altogether. Cratylus believed that nothing whatsoever may be predicated of the phenomena in flux. We are also told by Aristotle…
The Gold A nalogy in Plato's Timaeus (50 a 4 - b 5)
Plato, Statesman 284c-d: "An "Argument from the Sciences
Plato's Final Thoughts on Evil: Laws X, 899–905
This paper offers some general reflections on the nature of Laws X as a theodicy. I wish to suggest that Plato in the Laws X advances a solution to the of evil that is quite different from that in the Timaeus. Cherniss writes of his own mode of reconciling the Timaeus and Laws X 'that this account fails to solve the problem of evil, and so it does if evil is a to be solved only by demonstration of its non-existence or by moral justification of it…
The Gold A nalogy in Plato's Timaeus (50 a 4 - b 5)
The Formation of the Cosmos in the "Statesman" Myth
"Image, Flux, and Space in Plato's "Timaeus
H ERACLITUS WROTE THAT YOU CANNOT step into the same river twice for the waters are ever flowing new upon you (B49a, B12, B91, A6). We are told by Aristotle (Metaphysics 1010all-14) that Cratylus, a follower of Heraclitus, revised this slogan to read one cannot step into the same river even once, and then stopped talking altogether. Cratylus believed that nothing whatsoever may be predicated of the phenomena in flux. We are also told by Aristotle…
The Number Theory in Plato's Republic VII and Philebus
"Disorderly Motion in Plato's "Statesman
IN THIS PAPER I will argue that in the Statesman myth's account of alternating cosmic cycles, Plato views the phenomena, or physical objects, in and of themselves as a positive source of evil, moving erratically without psychic causes whether rational or irrational, direct or indirect.' In this respect and others, the cosmological commitments of the Statesman are the same as those of the Timaeus2 and are inconsistent
Gay Rights
The World-Soul in the Platonic Cosmology
In each of Plato's major cosmological works, the Timaeus, the Statesman myth and the Philebus , he asserts that the body of the whole universe is alive and possesses a single World Soul which extends throughout it. I wish to offer a new in terpretation of the role of the World-Soul which gives the World-Soul a special function in the economy of the Platonic cosmology and which explains why Plato would place such re peated emphasis on the existenc…
Platonic cosmology
Plato on Time and Eternity
Aids, Gays, and State Coercion 1
Mohr argues that coercive government policies in response to the AIDS crisis are unjustified and pose a serious threat to the rights of homosexuals. AIDS presently can be transmitted only to those whose actions place them at risk. Paternalistic state coercion is warranted only when a person has diminished capacity or when necessary to prevent someone from ceasing to be an independent agent. Furthermore, an individual may regard sex as a central v…
The Platonic Cosmology
Gay Ideas: Outing and Other Controversies
Beyond the Bounds
The contributions to this edition of Law Text Culture arose from a series of workshops and seminars which Luke McNamara and I organised through the Legal Intersections Research Centre at the University of Wollongong during 2001 and 2002. Having recently formed a research group focusing on the social and disciplinary intersections of law, we set out to explore these intersections with the help of colleagues working in law, humanities and social sc…
From Oxymoron to Intersection: An Epidemiology of Legal Research
The foregoing articles about research in and around law reflect a broad conception of what it is to be a legal scholar. The views and experiences of the authors gathered here are probably no more radical or heterodox than those to be found in any of the earlier editions of this journal or the many others devoted to themes of law, society, culture and contemporary legal theory. Having brought these people together to reflect on what it is that the…
Law and Identity in Spatial Contests
Law has had a traditional reference to land, conceived as territory, in the notion of a jurisdiction, where the law of the land applies equally to all individuals. Recent critiques of this view have suggested that a plurality of laws may apply in particular places. How this spatial pluralism impacts on dominant views of law is considered through two instances in which law has interacted with competing conceptions of place and territory in relatio…
Some Conditions for Culturally Diverse Deliberation
Cet article analyse les façons dont le raisonnement s'attache aux contextes culturels et pondère les fondements de la prise de décision dans une sorte de terrain commun ou dans une reconnaissance de la diversité. Il considère la critique féministe de l'éthique du discours selon Habermas et les efforts de Benhabib de réviser cette approche pour répondre à la diversité culturelle. Alors que la bonne volonté et de bonnes procédures peuvent certes cr…
Festival Filosofia sui Sensi
Identity crisis: Judgment and the hollow legal subject
In this article I will be suggesting that there is a problem with the modern legal subject. There is something missing, a gap in the middle of that subjectivity, which clouds our judgment. This split had its origin in the Enlightenment, its first effect being the separation of knowing from doing. Our experience of the world could only be mediated through self-conscious sense data and thought, without our being in direct contact with the satisfact…
Flesh and the Person
What connection is there between flesh and the legal person? Flesh is the most material aspect of human existence, while the legal person is one of its most abstract manifestations. The method is a phenomenological analysis of legal records of the body and identity, including everyday documents such as credit cards. These are analysed in terms of the information they contain or refer to, and the physical processes by which they are compiled or ac…
Responsibility and the Representation of Suffering: Australian Law in Black and White
This article critically analyses the concept of suffering, with particular emphasis on responsibility for and representations of suffering. Suffering is seen as a social relationship, with objective characteristics, classified by Renault as domination, deprivation and the weakening of intersubjective supports (désaffiliation). Veitch and Wolcher have inquired into legal responsibility for suffering. The author adds that suffering is also construc…
Reassembling the Legal: ‘The Wonders of Modern Science’ in Court-Related Proceedings
The article analyses the ways in which technology and law disperse, channel and reassemble agency in ICT-enabled legal proceedings. It works from case studies of online civil claims in England and Italy, and the automatically issued speed camera fine process in Australia. Information and communication technologies affect legal procedures in three dimensions: legitimacy, efficacy and performativity. The law can legitimate ensembles of technologica…
Signature and Illusion: Lessons from the Baroque for 'Truth' in Law, Arts and Humanities
Basic to contemporary problems in the disciplines of representation and interpretation is a split between a naïve acceptance of bare facts, presumed to exist in their own ‘objective’ world of objects, and the actions of subjects who interpret an intersubjective world. The solution is sought in some ‘new’ epistemologies: Martín Alcoff, Grosz, Kristeva, Butler, as well as in Benjamin and Gadamer, who look back to older ways of knowing. The methodol…
Crossing Over: Hosts, Guests and Tastes on a Sydney Street
Food and eating are material necessities of life and, at the same time, elaborate cultural and symbolic markers. Food is worked from the earth or killed and butchered, it is bought with money and it is masticated, swallowed, digested, and its waste products expelled. It is fundamentally, corporeally, even bestially physical. Yet food is also subject to rules, regulations and rituals that are complex and diverse. That diversity derives from a wide…
Philosophy (17 works) · Political science (17 works) · Sociology (17 works) · Epistemology (15 works) · Law (15 works) · Computer Science (8 works) · Art (7 works) · Classical Philosophy and Thought (7 works) · Politics (7 works) · Law in Society and Culture (6 works)