Reviews for Law, morality, and religion

The average rating for Law, morality, and religion based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-02-06 00:00:00 Joel Killen I really like the stated aim of Law as a Moral Idea: to connect jurisprudence to the philosophy of law tradition before 20th century analytical jurisprudence: The middle decades of the twentieth century did not provide an intellectual environment within which the sympathetic reconstruction and recovery of an older tradition of philosophical reflection upon law seemed possible or desirable. The dismissal of great swathes of political philosophy as embodying the errors of ‘essentialism’ was conducive to a high-handed attitude which made it well-nigh impossible for the present to learn from the past. Given this aim, I was expecting more Plato, Kant, and Hegel; less Hart and Fuller. But the split between the two was fairly even, or more in favour of the latter. Like a lot of academic writing, I found the introductory and concluding chapters to be very well-written and inviting to general readers, with everything in the middle being too complicated, appearing like semantic quibbles to everyone who is not actively involved in the area. One thing I found really interesting is Simmonds' idea of 'law as an archetype', which is a direct evolution of Plato's theory of forms: The concept of a ‘triangle’ is an example of what I shall call an ‘archetypal’ concept. Triangles are defined by a mathematical definition, but the requirements of the definition will not be fully satisfied by all actual instances of triangles. Indeed, there may be no real-world exemplars of the mathematical archetype. The actual instances of triangles that one comes across in the real world constitute triangles in virtue of the degree to which they approximate to the ideal ‘triangle’ of mathematical definition. So triangles do not constitute triangles by satisfying a set of criteria, but by approximating to an ideal archetype; and not all triangles are equally triangles: they are triangles to the degree to which they approach the ideal. Simmonds, however, differentiates archetypes from forms because archetypes connect experience with ideas. Forms, according to him, are 'otherworldly' ideals. I don't agree with this otherworldly idea of forms. In fact, I remember watching an interview on Plato with Bryan Magee where the Platonic scholar Myles Burnyeat rejects the idea that forms are 'otherworldly'. Also, his structured takedown of Hart is very pleasing to anyone who is not a legal positivist: The widespread and long-lasting influence of Hart’s theory in a sense demonstrates its success. But its success did not consist in the genuine dissolution of a bogus problem. Rather, Hart succeeded in obscuring, and leading people to forget, the deep and intractable problem that had always been at the heart of philosophical reflection upon law. Hart’s theory chimed with the spirit of an age that was keen to reveal the big traditional problems of philosophy as unreal...Having lost sight of its fundamental question, positivist jurisprudence was firmly set on a path that was to lead it towards ever greater sterility.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-10-01 00:00:00 Scott Erickson Read for MBA class