Naturalism and the Frontiers of Legal Science

The essay addresses one of the main challenges to the contemporary methodology of the law, namely a new wave of naturalistic approaches that follow the rapid progress in the studies of the mind as a basis for psychological, behavioral, and cultural phenomena. The book aims to address the extent to which new developments of a naturalistic worldview affect the methodological foundations of studying and explaining the law, and distinguishes two fundamentally different models of scientific inquiry. Interpreting legal texts has to remain an anti-naturalistic, hermeneutic enterprise, conceiving law as a combination of causally related facts. As such, its scientific status depends mostly on its ability to become a part of an interdisciplinary web of naturalistic explanations of reality.