Axel Hägerström

Works

• 1911On the Truth of Moral Ideas

  Inaugural lecture as professor of practical philosophy in Uppsala: moral judgements cannot be true or false, since “ought” names no property of things but a feeling joined to the idea of an action.

• 1953Inquiries into the Nature of Law and Morals

  English selection of his writings on law, edited by Karl Olivecrona and translated by C. D. Broad: rights, duties and the binding force of law are analysed as ideas with roots in magic and religion, not as real forces.

Position

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.

Life & context

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.

Further main works

• Kants Ethik im Verhältnis zu seinen erkenntnistheoretischen Grundgedanken systematisch dargestellt (1902)
• Das Prinzip der Wissenschaft (1908)
• Om moraliska föreställningars sanning (1911)
• Der römische Obligationsbegriff im Lichte der allgemeinen römischen Rechtsanschauung (2 vols., 1927, 1941)
• Philosophy and Religion (transl. R. T. Sandin, 1964)