Perspektywy post-pozytywizmu w filozofii prawa
Perspectives of Post-positivism in the Philosophy of Law

Summary/Abstract: Post-positivism has recently become the theoretical proposal of lawyers’ community, which seeks to cease quite unfruitful controversies between proponents and opponents of legal positivism. The article discusses this proposal from the perspective of the classical philosophy of law. The author considers three topics: the history of positivism, the most significant debates with positivism, the standpoint of post-positivism and its perspectives. The most important debate with positivism concerned the morality of law and the conceptual incompatibility of morality and law. The post-positivist proposal results from the internal evolution of legal positivism on the turn of two last centuries. It does not exceed then the positivist doctrine and is nor a compromise, nor an eclecticism. The core claim of the proposal is that every legal system implicitly contains its own morality, as it is the expression of a social and legal culture. Therefore the argument on the conceptual separation of law and morality loses its sense. The discovery and explanation of legal systems’ morality is to be a task of the descriptive sociology which – according to the author – follows the standpoint of A. Comte, a framer of legal positivism. In such situation moralities of different legal systems are incongruent and incomparable to each other, and the discipline of law loses its philosophical sense of normative discipline in the interest of positivist normativity.

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