List of contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Introduction; Claudio Corradetti -- PART I Historical and Philosophical Perspectives on Human Rights -- Chapter I Human Rights in History and Contemporary Practice: Source Materials for Philosophy; Jeffrey Flynn -- Chapter II Philosophy and Human Rights: Contemporary Perspectives; David Reidy -- Chapter III Reconsidering Realism on Rights; William E. Scheuerman -- PART II The Validit-(ies) of Human Rights -- Chapter IV The Concept of Human Dignity and the Realistic Utopia of Human Rights; Jürgen Habermas -- Chapter V The Justification of Human Rights and the Basic Right to Justification. A Reflexive Approach; Rainer Forst -- Chapter VI Social Harm, Political Judgment, and the Pragmatics of Justification; Albena Azmanova -- Chapter VII “It All Depends”: The Universal and the Contingent in Human Rights; Wojciech Sadurski -- Chapter VIII Tiny Sparks of Contingency. On the Aesthetics of Human Rights; Giovanna Borradori -- Chapter IX The Idea of a Charter of Fundamental Human Rights; Alessandro Ferrara -- PART III Democracy and Human Rights -- Chapter X  Is there a Human Right to Democracy? ; Seyla Benhabib -- Chapter XI Dialectical Snares: Human Rights and Democracy in the World Society; Hauke Brunkhorst -- Chapter XII The Normality of Constitutional Politics: an Analysis of the Drafting of the EU Charter of Fundamental Rights; Richard Bellamy and Justus Schönlau -- Chapter XIII Rights in Progress. The Politics of Rights and the Democracy-Building Processes in Comparative Perspective; Lorella Cedroni -- Chapter XIV Ethnopolitics. The Challenge for Human and Minority Rights Protection; Joseph Marko -- Chapter XV Human Rights in the Information Society: Utopias, Dystopias and Human Values; Giovanni Sartor -- Index.

This book presents a unique collection of the most relevant perspectives in contemporary human rights philosophy. Different intellectual traditions are brought together to explore some of the core postmodern issues challenging standard justifications. Widely accessible also to non experts, contributions aim at opening new perspectives on the state of the art of the philosophy of human rights. This makes this book particularly suitable to human rights experts as well as master and doctoral students. Further, while conceived in a uniform and homogeneous way, the book is internally organized around three central themes: an introduction to theories of rights and their relation to values; a set of contributions presenting some of the most influential contemporary strategies; and finally a number of articles evaluating those empirical challenges springing from the implementation of human rights. This specific set-up of the book provides readers with a stimulating presentation of a growing and interconnecting number of problems that post-natural law theories face today. While most of the contributions are new and specifically conceived for the present occasion, the volume includes also some recently published influential essays on rights, democracy and their political implementation.