Law and Philosophy [antikvár]

The present volume contains a selection of theoretical articles written during the past nearly quarter of a century, which have not yet been published elsewhere in a book form by their author. The first articles date from the dawn of my professional career. Barely a decade after the crushing of the 1956 revolution, I found myself confronted with the dilemma of intellectual existence versus non-existence. Struggling for survival, I was desperate at the time to find an independent and appropriate form of expression for an independent message, all under the compulsory and exclusive umbrella of Marxist rhetoric. Perhaps it had a symbolic significance as well that at the time the building of the Academy's Institute for Legal Studies was situated in the heart of the city, between the blue river of yore and the business quarter bordered by the kiskörút boulevard, or in other words between the Danube, which has seen many a mass murder and suicide, and the infamous Markó utca prison, which was a venue for countless executions. In those years, even the choice of subject by a researcher counted as a manifestation of his or her morál stance in our Central and Eastern European region. It was thus for want of a better choice that I finally decided to address the issue of the preamble, which I found to be largely unexplored, and which at the same time promised the researcher the thrill of an excursion to the boundary between normative enacting and non-normative objectivation. Not long after I reached this decision, I found myself turning toward another problem, which I had first tackled during my university years but was subsequently compelled to bottle up. This was the problem of the relationship between the law, linguistic expression and the realm of logic, and the peculiarities of the non-affirmative and non-descriptive linguistic manifestations. In my doctoral thesis, I made an attempt to define the instrumental nature of the logic of "ought'-sentences, and to highlight the peculiar role of cognition as an activity not covered although postulated by normative enacting. This thesis turnéd out to be indefensible amidst the political pressures of the day, and therefore in the last minute I was compelled to take up Henry Lévy-Bruhl's sociological concept of law instead. At the time, the debates over the status of logic in law were dominated by the French and Belgian schools, which approached the issue from the viewpoints of formalism versus anti-formalism, respectively. However reassuring was the fatherly support extended to me by Charm Perelman, this issue again proved to be impossible to take up. For the local mandarins of academic scholarship immediately recoiled at the idea, driven by the fear that my attempt to even raise that question would eventually evolve into a tacit epistemological criticism of Lenin's theory of reflection. Even my mere interest in the issue they considered a potential