Democracy, Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law: Beholden to Constituent Power

<p>Democratic government serves two purposes, both requiring that the substantive element of the rule of law be adhered to. A living constitution is required by a government to able to maintain civil society, which is the main occupation of the rule of law and, secondly, the rule of law also vouchsafes rights and freedoms. Hence, the rule of law enforced by the courts is the factor that controls the constitution, and increasingly this includes controlling the government, both the legislature and executive. This paper considers the capacities of democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, in the context of both New Zealand’s unwritten and America’s written constitutions, with the view of locating the constitution making power (constituent power). The power that makes and changes the constitution was originally found with the people, parliament, and the executive. However, a modern formulation of the rule of law that seeks to replace parliamentary supremacy as the ultimate principle of legality appears to be arising. An egalitarian society is becoming the preferred option by all parties. In this context, the constitution making power will be with the vessel that is working towards creating such a society. To that end, the paper recommends a Constitutional Commission for New Zealand that would review legislation for constitutionality, including adherence to the rule of law. The objective of the Constitutional Commission would be to recommend the review of law for constitutionality, including adherence to the rule of law.</p>

Democracy, Constitutionalism and the Rule of Law: Beholden to Constituent Power

<p>Democratic government serves two purposes, both requiring that the substantive element of the rule of law be adhered to. A living constitution is required by a government to able to maintain civil society, which is the main occupation of the rule of law and, secondly, the rule of law also vouchsafes rights and freedoms. Hence, the rule of law enforced by the courts is the factor that controls the constitution, and increasingly this includes controlling the government, both the legislature and executive. This paper considers the capacities of democracy, constitutionalism and the rule of law, in the context of both New Zealand’s unwritten and America’s written constitutions, with the view of locating the constitution making power (constituent power). The power that makes and changes the constitution was originally found with the people, parliament, and the executive. However, a modern formulation of the rule of law that seeks to replace parliamentary supremacy as the ultimate principle of legality appears to be arising. An egalitarian society is becoming the preferred option by all parties. In this context, the constitution making power will be with the vessel that is working towards creating such a society. To that end, the paper recommends a Constitutional Commission for New Zealand that would review legislation for constitutionality, including adherence to the rule of law. The objective of the Constitutional Commission would be to recommend the review of law for constitutionality, including adherence to the rule of law.</p>

Conceptual Design of Mars Lander with Novel Impact Intriguing System

Planetary landing is the ultimate principle of extraterrestrial exploration. But ef-fectuating successful landing is a strenuous assignment because lander may ex-perience a malfunction and can perform defective landing at any stage due to numerous factors. Here from the perspective of inefficient impact attenuator, we propose a design of Mars lander with a novel impact absorber fabricated from alloyed silicon-chromium spring damper integrated with a dual cylinder of distinct diameter to counteract the pressure variance exerted during landing. In addition to this, we have reviewed the past landing missions and discussed the approach to design and fabrication. Finally, from the derived formulations, we have displayed the preliminary results and we expect that the attenuator may bear an impact force of 20-140 kN for grounding 0.2-1.0-ton class crewed or cargo landers on Mars.

Husserl’s Project of Ultimate Elucidation and the Principle of All Principles

It is well known that Husserl considered phenomenology to be First Philosophy—the ultimate science. For Husserl, this means that phenomenology must clarify the ultimate phenomenological-epistemological principle that leads to ultimate elucidation. But what is this ultimate principle and what does ultimate elucidation mean? It is the aim of this paper to answer these questions. In section 2, we shall discuss what role Husserl’s principle of all principles can play in the quest for ultimate elucidation and what it means for a principle to be ultimately elucidating (letztaufklärend) and ultimately elucidated (letztaufgeklärt). We will see that the Husserlian thesis that originary presentive intuitions are an immediate and the ultimate source of justification qualifies as the ultimate epistemological principle.

The Timaeus on the Principles of Cosmology

This chapter presents a reading of Plato’s Timaeus. The Timaeus, like the Republic, emphasizes the need to grasp the proper principle of our disciplines of study. As Timaeus says in his opening speech, “Now in every subject it is of utmost importance to begin (arxasthai) according to the natural principle (arkhê)” (29b2–3). But what is the natural principle of cosmology? Timaeus’s cosmology concerns the coming-into-being of the cosmos, down to and including the nature of man. Thus, the question becomes: What is the natural principle of the study of the coming-into-being of the cosmos? It is shown that the principle is a principle of coming-into-being, not of being. Timaeus accepts that there may be more fundamental principles of everything, but cosmology, as he understands it, does not provide the appropriate method for approaching such ultimate principles. The subject of cosmology is the world as it has come into being, and its method one that is appropriate to this subject-matter. Cosmology, as Timaeus understands it, is not concerned with the principle of absolutely everything. Cosmology is not concerned with being as such, its ultimate principle is not the ultimate principle of being, and its method is not that of dialectic, in the Republic’s sense.

Self, Indian theories of

Hindu thought traces its different conceptions of the self to the earliest extant Vedic sources composed in the Sanskrit language. The words commonly used in Hindu thought and religion for the self are jīva (life), ātman (breath), jīvātman (life-breath), puruṣa (the essence that lies in the body), and kṣetrajña (one who knows the body). Each of these words was the culmination of a process of inquiry with the purpose of discovering the ultimate nature of the self. By the end of the ancient period, the personal self was regarded as something eternal which becomes connected to a body in order to exhaust the good and bad karma it has accumulated in its many lives. This self was supposed to be able to regain its purity by following different spiritual paths by means of which it can escape from the circle of births and deaths forever. There is one more important development in the ancient and classical period. The conception of Brahman as both immanent and transcendent led to Brahman being identified with the personal self. The habit of thought that tried to relate every aspect of the individual with its counterpart in the universe (Ṛg Veda X. 16) had already prepared the background for this identification process. When the ultimate principle in the subjective and objective spheres had arrived at their respective ends in the discovery of the ātman and Brahman, it was easy to equate the two as being the same spiritual ‘energy’ that informs both the outer world and the inner self. This equation had important implications for later philosophical growth. The above conceptions of the self-identity question find expression in the six systems of Hindu thought. These are known as āstikadarśanas or ways of seeing the self without rejecting the authority of the Vedas. Often, one system or the other may not explicitly state their allegiance to the Vedas, but unlike Buddhism or Jainism, they did not openly repudiate Vedic authority. Thus they were āstikadarśanas as opposed to the others who were nāstikadarśanas. The word darśana for philosophy is also significant if one realizes that philosophy does not end with only an intellectual knowing of one’s self-identity but also culminates in realizing it and truly becoming it.

Christian Reception of the ‘New-Music’ Debate in the Church Fathers and Clement of Alexandria

Evaluative judgments about musical innovations occur from the late fifth century BC in Greece and Rome and are reflected in similar discussions of Christian authors in the first centuries of the Empire. This article explores how pedagogical, theological, moral, and spiritual considerations motivate judgments on contemporary pagan musical culture and conclusions about the Christian attitude towards music. Biblical references to music inspire both allegorical interpretations and the defense of actual musical practice. The perhaps most intriguing Christian transformation of the ancient musical worldview is presented in Clement of Alexandria’s Protrepticus. Well-known classical music-myths serve here to introduce a superior ‘New Song’. Harmony, represented in the person of Christ who unites a human and a divine nature, becomes the ultimate principle of both cosmos and human nature. This conception allows music to become a prominent expression of the Christian faith and even inform the moral life of believers.

Creativity as Ultimate Principle

Whitehead writes that ‘[i]n all philosophic theory there is an ultimate’ It would be difficult to find a case study in Process and Reality, a description of the functioning of a philosophy’s ultimate principle. The only example that can be found is a succession of terms: ‘In monistic philosophies, Spinoza’s or absolute idealism, this ultimate is God, who is also equivalently termed “The Absolute”’. Whitehead says no more of it. But how does this ultimate work? Why has he been able to identify it with the ‘absolute’ or with ‘God’? These questions remain unanswered. It is possible, however, to reconstruct a discourse of the absolute by taking a detour to connect a few separate elements.