Plutarch (46-127 A.D.), who wrote an essay on superstition
Dear all,tomorrow prof. Zeno-Zencovich, who teaches comparative law in our faculty, will introduce us to the fascinating topic of the connections between law and superstition. You can find a little abstract below:
Abstract:
Law is considered the opposite - intellectually and culturally - of superstition. Over the ages lawyers have fought - and are still fighting -to free society from superstitions, which often are at the origin of violence, crimes, discriminations. But this battle is far from being won, and, on the contrary, superstition creeps into the practices of lawyers and the law is often used as a form of modern superstition. The class intends to analyse the following aspects:
1) The law and rule-making process as a product of superstitionary beliefs.
2) Superstitionary use of scientific evidence by lawyers.
3) Justice and superstition.
4) The rules of superstition.
Prof. Zeno-Zencovich CV:
I really appreciate this lesson about law and superstition, because it suggested me a good cue of reflection. In particular we can say that law could be assimilated to an antidote for superstition; in fact antidote includes in itself conception a certain amount of poison. Therefore law includes superstition and the other way round superstion comprises law in itself conception. this could be represented graphically by the image of yin and yang.
ReplyDeletewhat you think about it?
law and superstition is very interesting topic for me. I have always been fascinated by witch trials because I think it are a real example of the power of superstitions. Recently I have seen a film about the witches of salem in which it was underlined the facility with whom these women were sentenced. Only one witness or a clue were enough to convince the judge…but the most impressive thing is that there was a judge!!!!this let me reflect about the strength of superstition..in that time even the judges could not do anything the general agitation and so: is the conclusion that superstion is more powerfull than the law?
ReplyDeletei was thinking of the interesting lesson we had today about the connection between law and superstition. my thought and my questions are:don't you think that law and superstition have the same role in differenty situations?don't you think that, in the past, superstition had an important role to educate people?!
ReplyDeleteIgnorance is the cause and the reason why superstition exists, but i think that hidden behind the "magic effect of the superstition" there are always rational thoughts. social life taught to the people causes and effects that had negative(or positive) results, and people started to make and invent stories to force other people to follow the right behaviour(in the social aspect of course, not in the legal one- maybe it is more connected to the economic aspect of people life).i think that it is more an easy and strong way to tell the people what would be better to do in the daily sociasl life.
i think that this worked well in the past cause it was hard to let the folk know what the best way to act was.stories enriched with fear, luck, magic aspects etc were more compelling, and people that knew those, automatically acted in that way, cause these interesting stories were stocked in their minds, they totally captured their attention cause it wasn't boring and hard to be understandable.that is why the " magic aspect" started to run mouth to mouth faster than the rational reason, but like that people acted to avoid the bad luck, scared of the unknown effects.
to me this is very close to the role of the law.
often people don't even think of the reason why a law is made: people respect it cause want to avoid the penalty. of course, if people want to know what is the reason why a law is made, they can find it out easly, but the same thing could happen with the superstition.
what i think, in the same time, is that superstition in general could find a justification in the past, for the sensitization that could produce in order to a specific topic and for the values that, in the past, needed to be keeped.
today these meanings are lost(more or less), and what remains is just the "MAGIC EFFECT"that still scares people(that time for sure ignorant, or at least surface(!?!)).
for exemple the "salt and oil " story is something totally past.
salt and oil , back in the days, were things very expensive. this is the reason why (for the family business)was very bad a waste of it. that is why you cannot pass it to another person:it is easier that something falls down on the floor while you are passing it to someone else, than if you take it directly from the table!and it was also a problem of responsability: who wasted that precious possession?! who is passing it to someone, or who is taking it?!?
and if you let oil falling down on the floor, don't you think it is very unlucky already?!have you ever tried to clean up a floor with the fat fat oil on it?!
today salt and oil are not that precious anymore, would be more actual the same story with different subjects(lobsters, truffles and champagne), but anyway the story of the oil and the sald remains still. ...
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ReplyDeleteanother exemple would be wearing the purple in the theatres(and now in tv aswell).
we just keep the "MAGIC EFFECT" that people want to avoid, but i am pretty sure almost nobody knows the reason hidden behind. that is because the reason hidden behind was an actual value of the middle age....kind of far from nowadays....where the society values were totally different!
here you have the story:
people that worked in the show-business during the Lent had a very hard time!
when the church was very strict and people lived the whole life scared of hell, they couldn't amuse during the period of Lent cause it supposed to be a time dedicated to penance and fast.
actors etc , during these 40 days, had a very hard time to survive because nobody would pay their performances( much more if they were taking place in a public space where people could see that you were a bad christian!!).
well, in these 40 days the priests in the churches, when they celebrate, are dressed with a purple robe. this is the rational meaning hidden behind. knowing that i can understand why, in the ancian time, actors wouldn't look at purple in a good way, but today...when people don't have values anymore and for sure are not strict catholics anymore , it loose a reason to exist...except for the MAGIC POWER!!
(i doubt, if you ask people of the show business, walking on a red carpet ,the reason why they don't wear purple, they could answer with the rational meaning....)
the same thing could be used for other exemples..just think of the black cat crossing the street(how easly can you see him driving tired in the dark?!?), the stairs(don't you think there is a chance the stairs could fall on your head if you pass under it?!?!?!it is not a fixed structure!) etc!
giulia baliva
Last lesson was very original and interesting. I had never think about superstition in these terms, I didn't think this concept was so important nowadays. And the most surprising thing is that the superstitional system is full of rules. While in former times law and superstition were considered each one as the opposite of the other, nowadays it's impossible to separate rational and irrational elements in mankind. Concerning this, I have found a strange and funny case in which superstition becomes the object of a decree: in a village on the Scottish coast, the township has promulgated a curious decree, valid for four weeks,which is the ban of whistle. As the legend reports, whistling to the sea drives winds crazy! The whistle is like a challenge to the devil, where he could answer sending a storm.
ReplyDeletereading the comments and reflecting on the interesting lesson of the professor, I think, unlike many, superstition takes its force and has infected many people thanks to the law. in fact in the witch trials has used the law to intimidate, so I think the superstition of a few has many contagious and the fear of being punished by the law ensured that the superstition spread.
ReplyDeleteMonica Di Silvestro
i'm especially intrested in the role of superstition on law, during history. we have already talked about ordeals during dr.Thévenin lectures, discussing the Focault's papers about Truth and Juridicial Form, focusing about how the philosophical notion of truth is linked to the history of judicial practices; ordeals can be a good exemple of how, as already pointed out, superstition can play a big role in defining society's equilibrium. Medieval judicial ordeals accurately indeed assigned accused criminals' guilt and innocence- they did this by leveraging a medieval superstition called "iudicium Dei". According to this superstition, God condemned the guilty and exonerated the innocent through clergy conducted physical tests: ordeals' ostensible power to determine defendants' guilt or innocence rested on the idea that they were judgments of God. So, where man couldnt correctly assign criminal status, he recruited the Lord.
ReplyDeleteAnd, talking about, which-hunt, we can say this phenomenon has a long history: punishment for maleficium was prescribed in the earliest law codes preserved, both in ancient Egypt and Babylonia. The same in Rome: the XXII tables had provisions against evil incantations and spells intended to damage cereal crops, and later (2nd century a.C) there was the "Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis". Witch hunts sponsered by the Catholic Inquisition begun in the Late Middle Ages and has some devolpments in early modern Europe, but the most well-known witch trial has been the Salem witch trial(s, because there were in fact a series).
corallina lopez
Dear students,
ReplyDeletethank you for your very interesting comments. Certainly last class has been a unique opportunity to think about how superstition is linked to law. During the class, I had to connect prof. Zeno-Zencovich lesson with dr. Thévenin's classes but not exactly in the way Corallina has done but in a more general way. On the one hand, think about what we consider to be truth in court and about our concept of matter of fact nowadays and in the past (rituals render acceptable whatever decision: how scaring!). On the other hand, think about the relationship between legal concepts and natural sciences (the last ones borrowed the idea of fact from the legal context in the 17th century) and about how lawyers manipulate scietific data. Finally, we can connect the idea that superstion as well as law has its very strict rituals with dr. Furno's class on performance! It really seems that we are looking at law in a different way but that there is a kind of unity that I think is given by the fact that we are focusing on human beings (their history, way of behaving, faith, artistic expression, political aims, etc.) and their relationship with law rather then on law only.
See you on Wednesday
P.S. Prof. Zeno-Zencovich suggested a collection of essays:
"Law and Magic" by C.A. Corcos (not Giulia!), 2010
http://www.cap-press.com/pdf/1778.pdf
During professor Zeno-Zencovich' s lesson,was interesting to explore the subject of superstition in connection with the law.
ReplyDeleteSuperstition has always been, not only for the things that bring harm( black cat,friday seventeen etc) but also to those that bring good luck ( horseshoe, horn etc).
Superstition is basically a belief of practice resulting from ignorance, fear of unknown,trust in magic or chance.
Law is an antidote to fight the superstition: legal rules are based on logic and logic is rational, but this is a difficult task for law, because it is impossible to separate rational and non-rational elements in mankind( where there is the society, there is the superstition).
Superstition was rooted in ancient times, an example can be given by Roman society: for the Romans, divination was important to understand if it was or was not a good moment to start a venture.
It is strange too believe, but the superstition was also a primitive legal system.
Sara De Prosperis.
Do we consider magic and superstition the same thing? It is just a curiosity because to me they Are 2 different things, but maybe i am wrong!
ReplyDeleteThe Enlightenment inherited from the scientific development of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries immense confidence in the value and power of both mathematical and physical sciences.
ReplyDeleteThe Enlightenment polemic against the past, superstitious and obscurantist, is generally not denial of the history or of the positive elements of the tradition.
The common aim of the Enlightenment is an attempt to improve the conditions of living through knowledge and mastery of nature, and through constant criticism of customs, state and social structures.
General trend of the Enlightenment is the attempt to remove the fear of men, to push them towards self-government, to make them masters of themselves. So one of the biggest obstacles to this progress, is the religion.The religion of the past ia an authoritarian religion that imposes itself to the spirit as a dogma and superstition, it is fought. No religion should have a preeminent value on the others and you must spread a positive attitude of religious tolerance. Religion was a tool through which the regime put a brake on the advance of new political ideas and moral. The struggle the Enlightenment argued for the renewal of knowledge, to religious tolerance or even to discredit any remaining metaphysical or spiritual reality, as in materialism and Lamettrie d'Holbach, was also a political struggle.
Cristina Di Florio
For me the lesson about law and superstition was very interesting because it made me think for the first time about their relationship. I never thought about a possible relationship between the two, but with the professor Zencovich’s lesson, I noticed some connections between law and superstition. The lesson has served to underline that there are more connections than we think between law and superstition! Superstition is the product of the ignorance and law is an antidote to fight it. I agree with giulia: superstition and magic are two different things, but I think, law is an antidote to fight also magic, that is another product of the ignorance.
ReplyDeleteValentina Favilli
Dear Giulia,
ReplyDeleteI don't think that magic and superstition are the same thing but certainly we can find a connection or two. Think about the rituals of a witch doctor of an Amazon village: does he perform medicine, magic or superstition? Sometimes the bordes are very uncertain!
Superstion is stil rooted in our society especially in Southern of Europe.
ReplyDeleteMy granmother believes strongly in the negative influences emanating from the people who are close to us. whit a "magic" formula, water and oil takes away the "evil-eye" (malocchio) and many friends of mine ask help to her!
maybe superstion is the easy way, when something goes wrong is not our fault but is the bad luck!
Law is rational almost scientific,find an explanation for all.
Francesca R. Ingrosso