Paper's abstract

Jean-François Perrin, The Juridical Practice of Metaphysical Notions
The author intends to identify the a priori which conditions the reasoning of law praticians. The only a priori element he seems to have come across during his research is this mental category he calls "free will", i. e. the intuitive feeling of the possibility that behaviour be determined by will. It is this condition that makes it possible to produce the injunctions that inhabit the effective juridical order. This presupposition allows the interplay of argumentation, in the field of social relationships. The system of the effectively applied norms is not necessarily coherent, nor logic. Reason wins over rationality. The search for a usable solution often avoids the stumbling blocks of logic evidence. The dialectic reason, superior to the logic reason, is the only tradition that signs the epistemological specificity of real-life law.

Key Words : metaphysics, free will, epistemology
t. 38, 1993 : p. 267-278)