Reciprocal Freedom: Private Law and Public Right is an account of how the law can coherently concretize ‘the juridical’, understood as the internal morality specific to legal relationships. The book elucidates the relationship between private law and the state, presenting the Kantian notion of reciprocal freedom as the normative idea implicit in a legal order in which private law occupies a distinctive place. Emphasizing that the juridical—as the morality specific to legal relationships—does not involve an appeal to morality at large, this article responds to critical comments about the correlative structure of corrective justice, the Kantian conception of ownership, and the book’s treatment of distributive justice and of the rule of law. It also outlines the jurisprudentially fundamental difference between the scope of a right and the operation of a right, which lies at the heart of Kant’s distinction between the state of nature and the civil condition.

This article is a study of Pavel Florensky's philosophy of symbol in the context of his discovery of Palamism in the 1910s, when Florensky started to speak of symbol using Palamite language. It proposes a fundamental difference between Florensky's and Palamas’ teachings on symbol: Palamas views a natural symbol as the energy of an essence, while for Florensky symbol is the essence itself, the energy of which synergises with the energies of other essence. In this context the prehistory of the concept of synergy in Florensky is studied, leading to the identification of a further difference in the ontologies of Florensky and Palamas: while Florensky's ‘essence-energy’ has the property of necessary correlation with the ‘other’, following the tendencies of the philosophy of that epoch, in Palamas ‘energy’ does not presuppose any necessary correlation with the ‘other’. The author connects this difference in ontologies between the two thinkers with their respective teachings on symbol.