Abstract
Adolf Reinach belongs to the Brentanian lineage of Austrian Aristotelianism. His theory of social acts is well known, but his account of ownership has been mostly overlooked. This paper introduces and defends Reinach’s account of ownership. Ownership, for Reinach, is not a bundle of property rights. On the contrary, he argues that ownership is a primitive and indivisible relation between a person and a thing that grounds property rights. Most importantly, Reinach asserts that the nature ownership is not determined by positive law but presupposed by it. Some have objected that such realism raises insuperable difficulties as to the origin of ownership, difficulties that could only be dealt with under a more conventionalist approach. I argue that the independence of the nature ownership from positive law is, in fact, compatible with the claim that its existence is dependent on human conventions.
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Notes
Compare Aristotle: “Metaphysics, α, 1, 993b9-11. On this approach to philosophy as an attempt to unravel primitive certainties, see Mulligan’s (2006) remarkable paper.
Foundations, SW I, pp. 212–213; English tr. p. 73.
One may object that causal relationships are not—or not always— metaphysically contingent relationships. For instance, it is perhaps in the nature of a force to produce, under some conditions, an acceleration of the body on which it acts (Massin, forthcoming). As it happens, this is a possibility that Reinach does not seem willing to exclude. Indeed he specifies in a footnote that he leaves open whether essential relationships have a role to play in causal relationships (Foundations, SW I, p. 155; English tr. p. 49 n. 14). So he would presumably agree that if causal essentialism is true, then causal relations turn out to be grounding relations. But he would insist that the essential distinction at point here between causation understood as a contingent relation and grounding would remain untouched.
This idea displays some affinity with the Moorean view that the supervenience of values on natural properties is conceptual or a priori (by contrast to, e.g. the supervenience of colours on reflectances). A similar idea is also defended by Meinong (1924, ch. 11).
Hohfeld (1913, pp. 36–37) likewise insists—rightly—that the correlatives of liberties/privileges (which correspond to what Reinach calls “absolute rights”) are not duties not to interfere. But since, contrary to Reinach, Hohfeld believes that all rights have counterparties (and hence have correlatives), he is led—erroneously, I believe—to the odd view that the correlatives of privileges are instead “no-rights”. On Hohfeld’s view, the correlative to Paul’s right [that Paul says what he wants] is Julie’s “no-claim” [that Paul does not say what he wants]. On top its entailing that correlatives may have different contents, the oddity of the view stems from its reifying absences of rights as “no-right” that one can have. This odd consequence is really avoided if one accepts absolute rights with Reinach: rather than having “no-rights” as correlatives, absolute rights simply have no correlatives.
These specifities of granting first noticed by Reinach—granting rights which one does not have and keeping rights which one grants—raise important difficulties for the standard theory of economic exchanges which crucially relies on the assumption that exchangeables—which must include rights—are mutually transferred (Massin and Tieffenbach, to appear).
It is because he anchors the relation of grounding in the nature of grounds rather than in the nature of what they ground that Reinach considers as “very curious” the fact noted above (§2.2) that obligations and claims send us back to their natural foundations.
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Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jacob Arfwedson for the English translation of this paper from a French manuscript that is an extensively modified version of an earlier paper titled “Qu’est-ce que la Propriéte? Une Approche Reinachienne,” published in Philosophie, 1:74–91, 2016. I would also like to thank Gloria L. E. Zúñiga y Postigo, Emma Tieffenbach, Markus Haller, Juan Suarez, Kevin Mulligan, Ronan de Calan, Dominique Pradelle, Denis Seron, Arnauld Dewalque, Denis Vernant, and the participants to the workshop “The Realist Phenomenology of Adolf Reinach”, Paris, Archives Husserl, 2012 for useful comments and suggestions.
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Massin, O. The Metaphysics of Ownership: A Reinachian Account. Axiomathes 27, 577–600 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-017-9351-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10516-017-9351-5