Virginia Presi

This Chapter deals with the ontological problem of classifying entities strictly as social or legal. Therefore, the aim is to find a key of access to the unclear boundaries between social ontology and ontology of law. To do this, this Chapter will adopt a history of philosophy approach, offering an inquiry about the nature and the functioning of social and legal entities. It will appeal to Émile Durkheim’s intuition about social fact, Hans Kelsen’s theory about legal assignment of meaning, and Norberto Bobbio’s remarks on phenomenology applied to social sciences. The argument is that sourcing from sociology, social ontology, philosophy of law and phenomenology could represent a turning point to overcome few limits of the systematic ontological classification. In fact, adopting the only ontological perspective on this problem leads the research into the hypothesis whether social ontology is a subset of ontology of law and vice versa. Instead, a broader perspective allows us to grasp the nature of social and legal entities as facts, acts, and phenomena.

This paper deals with custom in action, namely, with the relationship between custom and action against the background of Amedeo Giovanni Conte’s nomotropism. Starting with Frerichs’ provocation of the peculiarity of saying ‘handeln nach der Sitte’ (acting according to custom) in favor of ‘sich handelnd nach was üblich ist’ (acting after what is usual), this paper will begin an exploratory research regarding the semantics and the ontology of custom to investigate the possibility of a nomotropic behavior in the field of custom. Therefore, this paper will quote, at first, Rudolf von Jhering’s theory, and, at second, Ferdinand Tönnies’ theory. In conclusion, this paper suggests that an inquiry into custom in action (and in particular Tönnies’ ontology of the normative) could benefit from the nomotropic categories of analysis – such as adeontic and deontic regularities.