Research Objectives

From its beginnings with the Sophists, Plato and Aristotle, philosophy has been strictly linked to law. How much philosophers and law scholars have mutually learned from each other, however, remains a subject where much still has to be learned. The project aims at starting to fill this gap by focusing on the following key subjects: conditional norms, conditional contracts and legal fictions. These topics play a crucial role in the different historical contexts the project is focused on, namely Roman Law, Leibniz´ legal writings and contemporary developments in logic.

Method

Within the contemporary discussion, research projects are usually categorized according to their historical or systematic perspective. Yet, all the members of the Jurilog project work on both levels. Because of the very nature of their research focus, however, the main strength of the team in Constance is to be found on the historical level, whereas the research team in Lille is more systematically oriented. Both perspectives are supposed to complement each other: the success of the project depends not only on a more systematic oriented approach to law but also on giving more historical depths to the study of logic.

As it is usually the case, the research results will take the form of scientific papers, which will present the outcomes of the cooperation between the German and the French side of the project. From this perspective, the conferences, workshops and meetings held at regular intervals at Constance and Lille are going to be crucial. The project is also availing itself of on-line tools in order to give continuity to the cooperation during the intervals between conference, workshops and meetings. More precisely, an online application (the Plateforme Collaborative) will permit to share texts and documents among the members of the the research group and to manage the calendar of activities.

Results

Given that JuriLog is an ongoing project, only the broad strikes of the desired results can be delineated here. The project group is confident that the results on the three different focus points will complement each other. The study of conditional contracts in Roman law on the background of Stoic logic should permit to deepen the understanding of Leibniz legal writings, especially with respect to his interpretation of Roman law. In turn, Leibniz insights on the logic and juridical structure of conditional contracts should pave the way to a theory of conditional contracts within the framework of contemporary formal logic. The same is true of the focus on legal fictions, which provides a red thread from Roman law to Leibniz and from Leibniz to contemporary developments in logic. From a broader perspective, the project aims at fostering the development of interdisciplinary studies by showing how different disciplines may enter into a two-way dialogue which challenges and deepens each single discipline.