The innovative and revolutionary scholarship of the eminent Austrian legal theorist and professor of Roman law, Eugen Ehrlich, is of a very high..

This Article examines the different meanings of Ehrlich’s idea of living law in relation to current debates about legal pluralism. It distinguishes three aspects of Ehrlich’s concept as these have been elaborated in the later literature: "law beyond the law," "law without the state," and "order without law." This retrospective shows that Ehrlich was not principally concerned with defending the rights of ethnic or autonomous communities as such. In taking his work further, it is important to recognize (...) to what extent official and unofficial law are even more interdependent today than in his day. But we may still find his work of relevance to thinking about the normative challenges of plural legalities. (shrink)

The book analyses the Indian Supreme Court's jurisprudence on homosexuality, its current approach and how its position has evolved in the past ten years. It critically analyses the Court's landmark judgments and its perception of equality, family, marriage and human rights from an international perspective. With the help of European Court of Human Rights' judgments and international conventions, it compares the legal and social discrimination meted out to the Indian LGBTI community with that in the international arena. From a social (...) anthropological perspective, it demonstrates how gay masculinity, although marginalized, serves as a challenge to patriarchy and hegemonic masculinity. This unique book addresses the lack of in-depth literature on gay masculinity, elaborately narrating and analysing contemporary gay masculinity and emerging gay lifestyles in India and highlighting the latest research on the subject of homosexuality in general and in particular with respect to India. It also discusses several new issues concerning the gay men in India supported by the living law approach put forth by Eugen Ehrlich. (shrink)

The ‘Hart-miracle’, then the ‘Hart-phenomenon’ are analysed through surveying (1) the state of legal philosophising in England preceding Hart, (2) his professional career and (3) the early British reception of his work, including (4) the kinds of criticism as to its methodology and presuppositions as well as (5) its becoming a master type of jurisprudence with Oxford as a centre. Taking it as a mainstream, the continental tradition of encouragement to productive thinking characteristic even of Kelsenism is contrasted with its (...) worldwide reception, by the effect of channelling thinking. Its reception in Hungary with an overview of which trends of legal philosophising of the 20 th century has exerted or failed to exert an impact upon - as echoed by - theorising on law in Hungary is also considered. As concluded, the places in the imaginary Pantheon of 20 th -century legal philosophising occupied by Max Weber and Hans Kelsen (as accompanied by Eugen Ehrlich and Gustav Radbruch who are deemed to have been decisively significant minor masters), representing the first half of the century, are complemented indeed by the places occupied by H. L. A. Hart and Ronald M. Dworkin in representation of the second half of 20 th century. (shrink)

Classical texts of continental legal theorising in Hungarian translation: RUDOLF VON JHERING: Kampf ums Recht [1872] / EUGEN EHRLICH: Freie Rechtsfindung und freie Rechtswissenschaft [1903] / HERMANN KANTOROWICZ: Der Kampf um die Rechtswissenschaft [1906] / RUDOLF STAMMLER: Richtiges Recht [1908] & excerpts from his Theorie der Rechtswissenschaft [1911/1923] & Richtiges Recht [1921] / FRANÇOIS GÉNY: Science et technique en droit privé positif [1924: excerpts] / GUSTAV RADBRUCH: Rechtsphilosophie [1932: excerpts] / HANS KELSEN ‘The Pure Theory of Law and (...) Analytical Jurisprudence’ [1941] & ‘The Law as a Specific Social Technique’ [1941] & ‘Value Judgments in the Science of Law’ [1942] / GUSTAV RADBRUCH ‘Gesetzliches Unrecht und übergesetzliches Recht’ [1946] / ALEXANDRE PASSERIN D’ENTRÈVES ‘Le droit naturel’ [1959] / HANS KELSEN ‘What is Justice?’ [1960] & ‘Positivisme juridique et doctrine du droit naturel’ [1963]. (shrink)

Este trabajo tiene un doble objetivo. En primer lugar, presentar dos paradigmas elaborados por Roberto Esposito y por Eligio Resta para pensar (con) otra racionalidad jurídica: derecho impersonal y derecho viviente. En segundo lugar, situar la genealogía de ambos paradigmas en las reflexiones suscitadas en el primer cuarto del siglo XX con Simone Weil y el debate Hans Kelsen-Eugen Ehrlich. La idea principal es plantear una singularidad jurídica en el interior de la Italian Theory.

Recent histories of American jurisprudence tend to ignore the fact that ideas that appeared in the United States often appeared simultaneously in Europe. Even those works that do not ignore the European context are content with tracing the influence or reception of European thought in America. This article suggests that another possible approach is to compare jurisprudential developments in the United States, Europe, and other places in order to reach more general, sociology-of-knowledge-like insights into the reasons why certain ideas appear (...) at certain times and places. One concrete example is discussed: the rise of an interest in the distinction between formal and "living" law in American and European jurisprudence in the first decade of the twentieth century. This distinction was central to the work of Roscoe Pound in the United States and the work of the Austro-Hungarian legal thinker Eugen Ehrlich. Pound and Ehrlich shared similar personal backgrounds. When they began advocating the study of informal law, both Pound and Ehrlich were teaching law in provincial towns situated on the frontiers of empires. Both towns were marginal places where different cultures clashed and where the legal culture of the center of the empire had only a tenuous hold. Scholars working in such an environment, it is argued, would tend to be more aware of the gap between formal state law and the actual norms governing the daily lives of people than scholars working at the center of an empire. The article offers additional support for this argument by looking at the scholarship of Guido Tedeschi, an Italian-Israeli legal scholar who taught at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in the 1940s. The article concludes by calling for the study of the history of American jurisprudence from a comparative perspective, taking into account such issues as the interaction between center and periphery and between empire and provinces in more than one national context. (shrink)

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It is proverbial that the European tradition of philosophy consists of a set of footnotes to Plato. However, one of his most informative works, the Atlantis story, had been totally neglected by the scientific community because for 2350 years it had simply not been understood. Plato wanted that only eligible persons shouldperceive his Atlantis story and therefore he codified it as an adventure tale. However, he placed a lot of ironical hints in his text. Anyhow, as irony isn’t everybody’s cup (...) of tea, nobody could follow him. Because of respect for Plato’s credibility; the Atlantologists tried to solve the Atlantis riddle as phenomenon, whereas just a simple analytic disquisition supported by lateral thinking had been requested. This is a challenge to prompt science to render account after 2350 years of the previous omission of the Atlantis theme and to start a serious discussion about the here presented analytic approach by lateral thinking to Plato’s Atlantis irony, which turns out to be his humorous metaphysical legacy. (shrink)

A questionnaire probing the distribution of authorship credit was given to postdoctoral associates (“postdocs”) in order to determine their awareness of the professional society’s ethical statement on authorship, the extent of communication with their supervisors about authorship criteria, and the appropriateness of authorship assignments on submitted papers. Results indicate a low awareness of the professional society’s ethical statement and that little communication takes place between postdocs and supervisors about authorship criteria. A substantial amount of authorship credit given to supervisors and (...) other workers is perceived by the postdocs to violate the professional society’s ethical statement. (shrink)

La démarche tient d'une « science de l'entre-deux » à la recherche de l'intervalle qui permettra de déchiffrer l'opposition de termes contraires et faire résonner leur fonction corrélative.

This paper empirically raises and examines the question of ‘conceptual control’: To what extent are competent thinkers able to reason properly with new senses of words? This question is crucial for conceptual engineering. This prominently discussed philosophical project seeks to improve our representational devices to help us reason better. It frequently involves giving new senses to familiar words, through normative explanations. Such efforts enhance, rather than reduce, our ability to reason properly, only if competent language users are able to abide (...) by the relevant explanations, in language comprehension and verbal reasoning. This paper examines to what extent we have such ‘conceptual control’ in reasoning with new senses. The paper draws on psycholinguistic findings about polysemy processing to render this question empirically tractable and builds on recent findings from experimental philosophy to address it. The paper identifies a philosophically important gap in thinkers’ control over the key process of stereotypical enrichment and discusses how conceptual engineers can use empirical methods to work around this gap in conceptual control. The paper thus empirically demonstrates the urgency of the question of conceptual control and explains how experimental philosophy can empirically address the question, to render conceptual engineering feasible as an ameliorative enterprise. (shrink)

In philosophical thought experiments, as in ordinary discourse, our understanding of verbal case descriptions is enriched by automatic comprehension inferences. Such inferences have us routinely infer what else is also true of the cases described. We consider how such routine inferences from polysemous words can generate zombie intuitions: intuitions that are ‘killed’ (defeated) by contextual information but kept cognitively alive by the psycholinguistic phenomenon of linguistic salience bias. Extending ‘evidentiary’ experimental philosophy, this paper examines whether the ‘zombie argument’ against materialism (...) is built on zombie intuitions. We examine the hypothesis that contextually defeated stereotypical inferences from the noun ‘zombie’ influence intuitions about ‘philosophical zombies’. We document framing effects (‘zombie’ vs ‘duplicate’) predicted by the hypothesis. Findings undermine intuitions about the conceivability of ‘philosophical zombies’ and address the philosophical ‘hard problem of consciousness’. Findings support a deflationary response: The impression that principled obstacles prevent scientific explanation of how physical processes give rise to conscious experience is generated by philosophical arguments that rely on epistemically deficient intuitions. (shrink)

Several important philosophical problems (including the problems of perception, free will, and scepticism) arise from antinomies that are developed through philosophical paradoxes. The critical strand of ordinary language philosophy (OLP), as practiced by J.L. Austin, provides an approach to such ‘antinomic problems’ that proceeds from an examination of ‘ordinary language’ (how people ordinarily talk about the phenomenon of interest) and ‘common sense’ (what they commonly think about it), and deploys findings to show that the problems at issue are artefacts of (...) fallacious reasoning. The approach is capable, and in need of, empirical development. Proceeding from a case-study on Austin’s paradigmatic treatment of the problem of perception, this paper identifies the key empirical assumptions informing the approach, assesses them in the light of empirical findings about default inferences, contextualisation failures, and belief fragmentation, and explores how these findings can be deployed to address the problem of perception. This facilitates a novel resolution of the problem of perception. Proceeding from this paradigm, the paper proposes ‘experimental critical OLP’ as a new research program in experimental philosophy that avoids apparent non-sequiturs of OLP, extends and transforms experimental philosophy’s ‘sources program’, and provides a promising new strategy for deploying empirical findings about how people ordinarily talk and think about phenomena, to address longstanding philosophical problems. (shrink)