Abstract
Philosophers of law traditionally asked questions of the form ‘What is X?’—“What is law?”, “What is a corporation?”, “What is a legal right?” This form of philosophical problem stems from Plato, who took it to be asking for a real definition of the nature or essence of the entity in question. The question ‘What is X?’ is ambiguous. It can ask for the purpose or cause or justification of institutions or practices as well as for definitions (EJP, 21). Long after this form of raising problems had been abandoned in most branches of philosophy, philosophers of law continued to use the old form and treat it as calling for a definition of the term.
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© 1992 Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht
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Bayles, M.D. (1992). Problems and Definitions. In: Hart’s Legal Philosophy. Law and Philosophy Library, vol 17. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8086-1_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-015-8086-1_1
Publisher Name: Springer, Dordrecht
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