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

TY - JOUR

T1 - On the Prometheus Legacy

T2 - Glenn’s Pluralist Logics, Melandri’s Analogy, and Legal Plurality’s “Ontological Register”

AU - Siliquini-Cinelli, Luca

N1 - Acknowledgment: Part of this article was written during a visiting scholar programme at the Centre for Law and Philosophy, University of Surrey, in June 2019. The visit was funded by the Strategic Development Initiative, School of Social Sciences, University of Dundee. My sincere thanks to Professor Veronica Rodriguez-Blanco for hosting me at the Centre and helpful conversations and exchanges. I also wish to thank Jaakko Husa for constructive comments on an earlier draft and all those who provided me with valuable suggestions. Errors are mine only.

PY - 2020/8/25

Y1 - 2020/8/25

N2 - 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.

AB - 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.

KW - H. Patrick Glenn

KW - Enzo Melandri

KW - logic

KW - plurality

KW - experiential thinking

M3 - Article

SN - 1477-0814

VL - 15

SP - 94

EP - 132

JO - Journal of Comparative Law

JF - Journal of Comparative Law

IS - 1

ER -