Empiria e senso comune nel diritto: una recensione Hegeliana a Gerstäcker

The essay investigates the treatment of the ‘common sense’ (gemeiner Menschenverstand) in Hegel’s early philosophical writings, with particular attention to juridical theories. Using as a background Hegel’s Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (1802-3), it shows how the ‘common sense’ and its pretended resort to facts are, according to Hegel, not only theory-laden and a field for a bad unintentional metaphysics, but also the common root of the empirical and the formal approaches, to be considered as the products of the illuminist ‘reflection’ (Reflexion) and ‘disjointing’ (Entzweiung). The review to Gerstäcker’s Versuch einer gemeinfaßlichen Deduktion des Rechtsbegriffs is considered in this work as a step towards the development of such a criticism.