Private Law Theory

ABSTRACT
Adolf Reinach (1883-1917) was a philosopher. Before his battlefield death at the age of 33, his philosophical career was brief; the corpus he left slim. Today, he is best known for developing a theory of social acts thought to be an independent precursor to the speech act theories of John Austin and others later in the century. He is cited in certain branches of philosophy for his contributions on speech act theory and other contributions to metaphysics, including the mode of existence of states-of-affairs, their relationship to other features of our world, and the role of ‘phenomenology’ in epistemology. In short, Reinach is taken today as a rather obscure metaphysician with a limited body of work. But Reinach was also a legal philosopher—and this Introduction situates Reinach in contemporary private law theory and summarizes the contributions to this volume, Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law (CUP 2025).

Toomey, James, Introduction – Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law (December 4, 2024) in Reinach and the Foundations of Private Law (Marietta Auer, Paul B Miller, Henry E Smith and James Toomey, eds, CUP 2025).