The article contains a review of the main arguments proposed by the philosophers of late structuralism against Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology, particularly, his theses on semantics. Polemics against the Husserlian conception of semantics are grounded in the structuralists’ opposition to the various theses of Husserl’s phenomenologies. Initially, it was an attempt at combining the logical and linguistic theses of Husserlian phenomenology with the structuralist theses proposed by Ferdinand de Saussure, as known from late works by Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In the 1960s, it (...) was an attempt at challenging the status of subjectivity – the subject, including the transcendental ego and the role of consciousness. Simultaneously, it is a polemic against essentialism, in regard to ontological, epistemological and anthropological theses. In the article, I focus on the polemics of the thinkers that reformulated Saussure’s theses, against Husserlian semantics which they considered in reference to the broad understanding of a sign, exceeding the sign of language. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to characterise and analyse Paul Amselek’s research approach to legal hermeneutics. The text provides an outline of Amselek’s assumptions and theses about legal interpretation, considered in the broad context of hermeneutics, and in the narrower context of legal logic and argument. In point of fact, one of the methodological aims of Amselek’s philosophical reflection is to harmonise the two indicated contexts for framing interpretation — the wide context of hermeneutics, and the more narrow context (...) of legal logic and argument. Amselek refers to issues in communication theory, reaching beyond the hermeneutic concept of text interpretation and evocation of the original authorial intention. He analyses the legal text-message in its content and argument layers, he also endeavours to specify the methodological possibilities of interpreting the attitudes and motivations of subjects — participants in communication situation. He also inquires about the ethical attitudes of jurisdiction authorities, performing the interpretation of a body of law — the subjects responsible for lawmaking and the execution of law. Adopting post-Enlightenment anthropological assumptions, Amselek accepts the primacy of rationality in cognition, decision making, and activity of the human individual. However, in his considerations on interpretation he concurrently underscores the role of affective factors, motivating many choices and actions made by legal subjects. (shrink)

The goal of the text is to reconstruct the concept of cultural normativity found in the phenomenological philosophy of law. The starting point of the text is the distinction between cultural normativity and normativity in culture. This distinction is based on reference to an extra-cultural, but not non-human instance – transcendent to the creations of humanity and its world, but in relations with the human equipment, with the characteristics of a specific human being and its existence. The specific relations between (...) cultural and legal normativity can be found in phenomenological concepts of law, which draw on the Husserlian transcendentalism and essentialism. The phenomenology of law attempts to answer the question of the sources, and the ontological and epistemological status of normativity as such. Normativity as a written and unwritten set of norms is characterized by phenomenologists with reference to value and axiology. The values are assumed by them as certain fixed reference points (“horizon of values” given to be recognized), because norms make it possible to establish rules for various individual and collective practices within a particular community and culture on the basis of values. (shrink)