Faces of Truth

For 2000 years, the study of law has assumed that our biological nature is a mere accessary of reason. Stig Jorgensen turns this scientific rationalism on its head. By using biology as his starting point, he portrays reasons as a tool of our genes, alongside other survival tools such as our senses and drives. His perspective makes other recent developments in the philosophy of law seem less strange, particularly in the fields of instrumental language philosophy and teleological concept theory. Such hermeneutic approaches have become indispensable to both interpretation theory and the study of law. Jorgensen has developed his pluralistic theory of law over the course of several books, and the current colume is a direct continuation of On Justice and Law (1996). In it he presents a more detailed account of anthropological epistemology and legal science, describing how such a pluralistic and fragmented view must affect the way we perceive the function of law and the issues that surround judicial decision.