La filosofia del diritto come metodo e l’oblio della riflessione sul diritto naturale

Is there a progress in philosophy? There is a widespread opinion that philosophy is not progressive in the way sciences are. In the field of legal philosophy the acceptance of this view goes hand in hand with a conception of philosophy as the method of legal science, whatever is meant by this notoriously ambiguous expression. Adopting this conception, however, comes with a price: the neglect of questions, like those concerning natural law, that were regarded as fundamental until the rise of the methodological view in the twentieth century. If philosophers are just underlaborers in the vineyard of legal science, their position with respect to positive law students is bound to be very weak, and their claim to a special kind of knowledge is impaired.