Abstract

Starting from his first interests in Classical Philosophy and Transcendentalism, through his contacts with Darwinism and Pragmatism, Oliver Wendell Holmes demonstrates that the good jurist is the philosopher capable of grasping the great forces that lie behind the legal details that condition so much the actions of men. Philosophy is an intellectual passion that finds in law an exceptional field of conceptual analysis and experimentation, posing crucial problems from an existential and relational point of view. The best way to approach its study is therefore to consider it, as he says, a «profession of thinkers». Legal challenges can be accepted and faced only at the height of a philosophically trained mind