Rethinking the Human—Thing Relationship: A Convivencia Towards Interdisciplinary Research

ANDREA PRADI, SARA HEJAZI, RICHARD HALL-WILTON

ABSTRACT: This article offers a critical re-examination of the human–thing relationship through an interdisciplinary lens, tracing the anthropocentric and deterministic assumptions that have shaped Western legal and scientific thought since the rise of modernity. The first part reconstructs the epistemological foundations of this worldview, rooted in seventeenth-century mechanistic science, which positioned the human subject as external to and sovereign over a passive, fully knowable world. This logic deeply informed the legal architecture of modernity, particularly through the doctrines of sovereignty and private property, which became central tools for asserting human control over the material world. The second part explores how this paradigm has been challenged by developments in contemporary physics—especially the relational ontology of quantum theory—as well as by anthropological and ethnographic research that reveals the co-constitutive nature of human and non-human agency. These shifts call into question the presumed neutrality and universality of legal categories. Drawing on the methodology of comparative law, the final part argues for a reorientation of legal thinking: away from abstraction and control, and toward a plural, situated, and relational model of normativity. In this light, law is no longer a neutral framework imposed from above, but a cultural practice embedded in material, ecological, and symbolic relations. The article concludes by proposing the notion of a convivencia of things as a heuristic for reimagining legal institutions capable of responding to the complexity of a shared, entangled world.

KEYWORDS: Epistemology of Modernity, Subject, Object Dualism, Quantum Paradigm Shift, Relational Ontologies, Comparative Law and Interdisciplinarity

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Macau Journal of Global Legal Studies, Volume 2 (2025)