Metaphysical Vagueness, Identity of Legal Cases, and the Rule of Law

Keywords: rule of law, vagueness, Leibniz law, vague identity, legal indeterminacy, metaphysical vagueness, legal cases.

English abstract: This paper proposes an approach to scientific biography from the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s theoretical project. The choice of Leon Petrażycki (1867–1931), a philosopher and sociologist of law, who might be called an icon of the philosophy of law in Poland, results from the fact that his trajectory gives an insight into the interesting processes taking place in the scientific field, as well as in other social fields at the turn of the century up to the 1930s. Thus, L. Petrażycki is a ‘special case of what is possible’, a ‘product’ of the era. An era marked, on the one hand, by strong geopolitical divisions, corresponding to unequal flows of ideas between national scientific fields, on the other hand, characterized by high fluidity of the boundaries of social fields (science, journalism, politics), between which (up to a certain point) L. Petrażycki adroitly ‘moves’. Petrażycki’s trajectory is also interesting research-wise, as it reveals the influence of social structures on scientific positions occupied and positions takings in discourse. Furthermore, it shows how scientific failure is sublimated. Therefore, the article complements previous perspectives and is programmatic in that it can inspire similar endeavours in the future.

This text is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.