On Monday afternoon and Tuesday, I will be attending a conference at the Institute for Law and Philosophy at Rutgers Law School in Camden, New Jersey. Here's a link to the conference web page, and here's a blurb:
Naturalism - roughly, the idea that philosophy should be continuous with natural science - presents the greatest challenge to "conceptual analysis" as a philosophical method. Since Plato, philosophy has attempted to discover analytic truths--statements that are necessarily true as a function of meanings, as opposed to the synthetic truths of empirical science. The American philosopher, Willard Van Orman Quine, is famous for his attack on the analytic/synthetic distinction. As a consequence of the work of Quine and others, contemporary philosophy has turned away from pure conceptual analysis, but in jurisprudence conceptual analysis goes on, almost as if the naturalistic turn in philosophy had never occurred. Legal philosophers continue to investigate questions like, "What is law?" and "Are there any necessary legal truths?," as analytic rather than empirical questions. If Quine is right, the jurisprudential naturalist maintains, jurisprudential appeals to "the essential properties of law" are fundamentally misguided and doomed to failure. . . . This conference will look at naturalism generally and assess in particular its implications for legal theory.
If you are a reader of the Neuroethics & Law Blog who plans to attend, I encourage you to introduce yourself.
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