Dr. Simon Gansinger

Published in 1963, Theodor W. Adorno’s “Sexual Taboos and Law Today” constituted a timely intervention in the public debate on changing sexual mores in the 1960s. Critiquing repressive bourgeois morality and progressive sexual values alike, the essay suggests that the utopian potential of intimacy is inseparable from the tension sex­u­al­ity… more

Max Horkheimer is often overlooked as a legal theorist. Yet his writings contain an original analysis of law, starting from the observation that there is a tension between political power and its legal form. On the one hand, law is a means of domination, instituted for the purpose of reinforcing the rule of some people over others. But on the other… more

For many readers of the Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s account of punishment is an exemplar of retributivism. However, there have been heterodox voices that associate Hegel’s argument with consequentialist and, more recently, with expressivist justifications of punishment. A growing number of scholars argue that, rather than offering… more

Despite the vast literature on rights, duties, responsibility, and punishment, the normative notion of wrong is often dealt with, if at all, as an afterthought. This project aims to challenge the casual attitude towards wrong, wrongs, wronging, wrongfulness, and the like, by looking at the concept through the lens of GWF Hegel’s mature philosophy… more