أكسل هيغرستروم

الأعمال

• 1911في صدق التصورات الأخلاقية (Om moraliska föreställningars sanning)

  محاضرة تنصيب أستاذًا للفلسفة العملية في أوبسالا: الأحكام الأخلاقية لا يمكن أن تكون صادقة ولا كاذبة، لأن «ينبغي» لا يسمّي خاصية في الأشياء بل شعورًا مقترنًا بفكرة فعل.

• 1953بحوث في طبيعة القانون والأخلاق (Inquiries into the Nature of Law and Morals)

  مختارات إنجليزية من كتاباته في القانون، حرّرها كارل أوليفيكرونا وترجمها س. د. برود: تُحلَّل الحقوق والواجبات والقوة الإلزامية للقانون أفكارًا لها جذور في السحر والدين لا قوى حقيقية.

الموقف

Hägerström is on the map as the founder of a Scandinavian path to anti-metaphysical philosophy, developed independently of the Vienna Circle. He held that reality is the one spatio-temporal world and that much of philosophy rested on “subjectivism”, the confusion of what is thought with what exists; metaphysics, he declared, must be destroyed. In ethics he was among the first to state a non-cognitivist view: to call something good or obligatory is to express a feeling or a command associated with the idea of an action, not to state a fact. Applied to law, this meant that rights, duties and the “binding force” of law are not real forces but ideas, whose roots he traced to magic in early Roman law; a science of law has to explain them by their history and psychology instead of presupposing them. This programme became Scandinavian legal realism, continued by Lundstedt, Olivecrona and Ross. Scholars still discuss whether Hägerström held a strictly non-cognitivist view or an error theory, according to which moral and legal judgements claim something false, and how these two strands fit together. His line on the map leads to Alf Ross, who studied with him in Uppsala.

الحياة والسياق

Axel Hägerström was born on 6 September 1868 in Vireda in Småland, the son of a clergyman. He studied theology and then philosophy at Uppsala, took his doctorate in 1893 and taught there for the rest of his career; from 1911 to 1933 he was professor of practical philosophy. His early work dealt with Kant, on whose ethics he published a large study in 1902, and his inaugural lecture “Om moraliska föreställningars sanning” (1911) set out the thesis that moral judgements are neither true nor false. In two volumes on the Roman concept of obligation (1927 and, posthumously, 1941) he traced legal ideas back to magical and religious notions. With his colleague Adolf Phalén he shaped Uppsala philosophy for a generation; jurists such as Vilhelm Lundstedt and Karl Olivecrona and the Danish legal philosopher Alf Ross developed his ideas. He died in Uppsala on 7 July 1939. English translations, above all “Inquiries into the Nature of Law and Morals” (1953), made his work known beyond Scandinavia.

أعمال رئيسة أخرى

• Kants Ethik im Verhältnis zu seinen erkenntnistheoretischen Grundgedanken systematisch dargestellt (1902)
• Das Prinzip der Wissenschaft (1908)
• Der römische Obligationsbegriff im Lichte der allgemeinen römischen Rechtsanschauung (2 vols., 1927, 1941)
• Philosophy and Religion (transl. R. T. Sandin, 1964)