On the Prometheus Legacy: Glenn’s Pluralist Logics, Melandri’s Analogy, and Legal Plurality’s “Ontological Register”

Over the past few years, legal theorists and socio-legal scholars have increasingly been advocating the formation of a pluralist jurisprudence capable of efficiently identifying and operationalising current regulative phenomena beyond and within state-based constructs. The cosmopolitan rethinking of legal thought centred on the emergence of non-classical, paraconsistent logics promoted by the late leading comparatist H. Patrick Glenn has become a key-theme of these new meta-theoretical reflections. Starting from this premise, this article explores Glenn’s call for logical pluralism in (comparative) legal studies through the lens of the Italian philosopher Enzo Melandri’s reflections on what distinguishes the rationality of classical and paraconsistent logics from that of analogical reasoning. The aim is to show that a contextualisation of Glenn’s thought from the perspective of Melandri’s philosophy confirms how because of their inner rationality and cognitivist purpose, neither classical nor paraconsistent logics can act as a gateway to legal plurality’s facticity. Instead, as plurality is a matter of factical experience rather than reason and knowledge (and thus, analytical reconstructions), what is required is a factical, experiential thinking capable of accommodating the facticity of otherness as (cultural) diversity and alterity in the legal dimension.