11 March 2020: Dr. Paweł Banaś (Faculty of Philosophy and Faculty of Law and Administration of the Jagiellonian University, Poland) – Legal Facts – An Introduction to Ontology of Law (Room VI, Trg Republike Hrvatske 14, 10:00 – 11:30 am).

ABSTRACT:

In my presentation I plan to introduce one of the most general problems of contemporary metaphysics, namely “the placement problem”. It amounts to a question of how to locate certain metaphysically suspicious facts within our default naturalistic picture of what exists. Among such metaphysically suspicious facts there are i.e. moral, aesthetics but also legal facts.

There are different placement strategies that aim to solve the placement problem. If one aims to provide a substantial (or non-trivial) answer to the question of how propositions of law can be true (or false) in the first place, it is not enough to say that there are some corresponding legal facts. One must also say how these facts fit with the world and all the restrictions that come with it. And this is what placement strategies are about.

During my presentation I will focus on a concept of a legal person – in order to illustrate how different placement strategies (or metaphysical/ontological theories) may help us understand fundamental categories of a legal discourse.