10 - The Method of Presuppositional Interpretation

Summary

Having so introduced and discussed my substantive conception of legal obligation, I will conclude my argument by presenting and elaborating on the specific methodological principles and assumptions that underpin the revisionary Kantian conception. Those principles and assumptions, I will contend in Chapter 10, shape a specific methodology – I will call it the method of ‘presuppositional interpretation’ – that is akin, but irreducible, to methods traditionally used in legal and political philosophy, such as conceptual analysis, reflective equilibrium, transcendental argument, and Kant’s analytic method. As a distinctive method of inquiry, presuppositional interpretation describes a process through which we identify (a) the defining traits of legal obligation and (b) the essential presuppositions that make it possible for us to even conceive of legal obligation, in such a way as to (c) provide a systematic and coherent scheme for interpreting the fundamental features of legal obligation and its basic conditions of intelligibility.