Adolf Reinaсh and His Forgotten Phenomenology of Law Project

Abstract

The main point of the article is that methodology of the theory and philosophy of law needs update. As a solution, it is proposed to turn to the undeservedly forgot­ten achievements of the theory of a priori foundations of the civil law by Adolf Reinach. The article presents such directions as the onto-epistemological sub­stantiation of integrative legal thinking and the linguistic aspect of the studies of social acts. It substantiates that Reinach’s contribution to the implementation of the first direction consists in identifying the ontological reasons for the limita­tions of positive law, and shows the conditions for the constitution of the integra­tive legal object of civil law – the promises. The need for the development of the second direction is proved with the help of a comparative analysis of Reinach theory of social acts and the theory of speech acts in analytical philosophy.
In particular, he made it possible to identify the following, anticipating the achieve­ments of analytical philosophy, the conceptual provisions of Reinach: 1) speech acts are derived from social acts and, as a result, 2) the structure of speech acts is similar to the structure of social acts, 3) the authenticity of speech acts is a condi­tion for implementation communicative intentions, 4) the structure of social acts determines the responsiveness of the subject of speech acts; 5) promise is a proto­type(protoform) of normativity; 6) the dichotomy of the conditional and the uncon­ditional, the absolute and the relative in social acts and in the corresponding speech acts should be resolved on the basis of an integrative approach.