Burazin on Brian Leiter and the Naturalization of the Philosophy of Law

Luka Burazin, University of Zagreb Faculty of Law, is publishing Brian Leiter and the Naturalisation of the Philosophy of Law in The Province of Jurisprudence Naturalized (Jerzy Stelmach, Bartosz Brożek, and Łukasz Kurek eds. Warsaw: Wolters Kluwer 2017).

The paper opens with an exposition of the basic ideas of the philosophical school of naturalism and its most widespread version, methodological naturalism. This is followed by three of Leiter’s proposals for the naturalisation of questions of the philosophy of law: the first consists in naturalising the theory of adjudication modelled on replacement and normative naturalism in epistemology, the second consists in turning the philosophy of law into the abstract and reflective part of the empirical social sciences on law, and the third consists in colonising the philosophy of law with experimental philosophy. The thesis that the last version of Leiter’s naturalism is, in fact, reduced to a so-called modest methodological naturalism is put forward. The paper closes with the most important criticisms of Leiter’s naturalistic methodological approach, as well as with the thesis on the complementarity between conceptual analysis and modest methodological naturalism.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.