Exemplarity and Singularity: Thinking through Particulars in Philosophy, Literature, and Law [Paperback]

This book pursues a strand in the history of thought  ranging from codified statutes to looser social expectations  that uses particulars, more specifically examples, to produce norms. Much intellectual history takes ancient Greece as a point of departure. But the practice of exemplarity is historically rooted firmly in ancient Roman rhetoric, oratory, literature, and law  genres that also secured its transmission. Their pragmatic approach results in a conceptualization of politics, social organization, philosophy, and law that is derived from the concrete. It is commonly supposed that, with the shift from pre-modern to modern ways of thinking  as modern knowledge came to privilege abstraction over exempla, the general over the particular  exemplarity lost its way. This book reveals the limits of this understanding. Tracing the role of exemplarity from Rome through to its influence on the fields of literature, politics, philosophy, psychoanalysis and law, it shows how Roman exemplarity has subsisted, not only as a figure of thought, but also as an alternative way to organize and to transmit knowledge.

1. Introduction: Mich?le Lowrie and Susanne L?demann,  I. The Practice of Theory: A Historical Reminder,  2. Hans Lipps, Instance, Example, Case, and the Relationship of the Legal Case to the Law,  3. Bernhard Waldenfels, For Example,  4. Anselm Haverkamp, Equivalence Unbalanced  Metaphor, Case, and Example  from Aristotle to Derrida,  5. Eva Geulen, Without Example: Adorno,  II. The Roman Practice of Exemplarity,  6. Rebecca Langlands, Roman Exemplarity: Mediating between General and Particular,  7. Matthew Roller, Between Unique and Typical: Senecan ExelÃ@