The essay addresses one of the main challenges to the contemporary methodology of the law, namely a new wave of naturalistic approaches that follow the rapid progress in the studies of the mind as a basis for psychological, behavioral, and cultural phenomena. The book aims to address the extent to which new developments of a naturalistic worldview affect the methodological foundations of studying and explaining the law, and distinguishes two fundamentally different models of scientific inquiry. Interpreting legal texts has to remain an anti-naturalistic, hermeneutic enterprise, conceiving law as a combination of causally related facts. As such, its scientific status depends mostly on its ability to become a part of an interdisciplinary web of naturalistic explanations of reality.

Tomasz Pietrzykowski is professor of legal theory and philosophy of law at the University of Silesia in Katowice. He is the author of numerous books and articles on various aspects of personhood, animal rights, and others. He is a practicing lawyer and the former head of Silesian governmental administration.