This festschrift, in honor of the work of Gray L. Dorsey, covers their major areas of his lifelong commitment to the culture and jurisprudence of law in an historical and comparative, East-West context. Within his normative framework, Dorsey took account of the crisis in positivism, Marxism, and alternative conceptions of value in the law. His work emphasized intercultural conflicts in a societal and global environment without surrendering the sense of western culture and its special contributions to legal and moral thought. The volume, originally prepared as a special issue of the Washington University Law Quarterly, has the benefit of an urbane new opening essay by Professor Vojcanin, which seeks to show how jurisculture is a "treasure map one may use to unearth the holes in which justice was hidden." It also contains a special essay by Gray Dorsey to conclude the volume in which he offers his current views on the philosophy of law and social theory in general. The volume is vigorous in its analysis, and central to any serious appraisal of the status of the philosophy of international law at this stage in history. The essays by Abraham Edel, Elizabeth Flower, Harold J. Berman, and Iredell Jenkins give special attention to this theme. The chapters by Jerome Hall, Herbert H.P. Ma, and Thomas H. Fang each take up a central issue in the relationship of world religion to world law. A third set of papers--by Edward McWhinney, Palitha T.B. Kohona, and Jacob W.F. Sundberg, discuss the major sociological implications of Dorsey's type of legal theory--with figures from Karl Marx, Max Weber, and F.S.C. Northrop covered in detail. For three decades, Gray L. Dorsey has contributed to comparative legal systems, emphasizing through his novel method of reasoning--jurisculture--a synthesis of empirical investigation and legal reasoning. Dorsey's work focuses on a set of meanings derived without reference to observed events, but by the adaptation and use of fundamental beliefs to organize and govern human cooperation. Gray L. Dorsey is Charles Nagel Professor Emeritus of Jurisprudence at International Law at Washington University Law School in St. Louis. He is the author of, among other works, Beyond the United States: Changing Discourse in International Politics and Law, and Jurisculture--the first two volumes, on Greece and Rome, and on India and China are now published by Transaction Publishers--with an additional five volumes remaining to complete this massive project. He is a past president of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.
This second in a definitive eight-volume work by Gray L. Dorsey explores the organization and regulation of society in traditional India in relation to prevailing beliefs about reality, knowing, and desiring. Dorsey's central concept of jurisculture sees human societies as organized and regulated by cultural processes. Human beings can cooperate only when they understand in accordance with shared meanings, desire in accordance with shared values, intend in accordance with shared purposes, and guide and limit actions in accordance with shared principles. These shared meanings, values, purposes and principles are evolved from fundamental beliefs. This second volume examines the roots of jurisculture in India, in the fundamental beliefs arising from the Vedas, Jainism, Buddhism, Carvakian materialism, the great epic poems (the "Ramayana "and the "Mahabharata), "and the six orthodox systems of Hindu philosophy. It traces the influence of these beliefs in the direction and control of the cooperative activities of society and also in individual actions .during the three millenia from 1500 B.C. to 1500 A.D., with some echoes in the modern period. Dorsey explains why India, unlike Greece or Rome, did not experience a social revolution when the basis of fundamental beliefs changed from speculative faith to rational knowledge. Because ultimate reality came to be understood as being, instead of activity, the highest good became withdrawing from society into communion with the inner self. This good could be attained only by Individual action. Society, therefore, was not as important as in the West. Indians lived in two realms of existence: the realm of soul development, and the realm of moral cause and effect. Philosophers of law, political scientists interested in the development of normative theory, and general readers who have thought of Indian culture as mystical and esoteric will find this volume of interest.
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