Abstract

Retracing his own intellectual journey, the author explains the choice that led him to hermeneutics. This stance is part of a broader perspective upon the rehabilitation of practical reason, which in the specific field of legal philosophy sees law as a complex social practice, in this sense deriving from inter-subjective processes of action in which constantly moving rules interweave with interpretative attitudes. For the author legal hermeneutics is perhaps even the ideal perspective from which to consider an alternate route for understanding law, as opposed to both positivist and natural law theories. The author also highlights how issues of interpretation currently assume particular importance in the reality of pluralism, and that this makes the hermeneutic approach an excellent model precisely insofar as it understands law as an interpretive social practice.