| dc.description.abstract | This doctoral thesis faces the tough task of approaching how Criminal Law and Philosophy relate to each other since the beginning of codification movements. These movements led to exegetical positivism, and Law ended up being isolated towards other knowledge areas. The concerning of not making Law overly philosophic and not making Philosophy overly juridical led jurists to deny the relationship between both disciplines. Further, the shift into normative positivism, especially with Kelsen and Hart, represents recognizing the role of language in interpreting Law, thus emerging the issue of ambiguity and vagueness of laws. To solve linguistic imprecision of vagueness doctrine, the “answer” is the discretion of the applier and, again, the hermeneutical issue tends to overshadow. In this context of separation from Philosophy and bonding to method, in a Cartesian way, the general theory of crime handles with the concept of vagueness doctrine, ignoring the hermeneutical characteristic of criminal legality. In this context, the general law theory seems to be unwilling to recognize the hermeneutical characteristic of Law, considering that criminal legality (and many other issues) does not relate with philosophical movements, especially language philosophy. The interpreter still decides according to his consciousness. For instance, the context of criminal law, shows that the idea of vagueness doctrine is manipulated in order to be a way of custody of juridical property and new risks, government policy, as well as a way of controlling poverty and fear. Thus this thesis aims at unfolding possibilities of overcoming this crisis in criminal vagueness doctrine, by combining hermeneutical Philosophy of Martin Heidegger, philosophical Hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer and, later, integration theory of Ronald Dworking, using as guiding principles the hermeneutic criticism of Law by Lenio Streck. This path is covered keeping in mind the goal of finding a theory of decision concerned with correct answers considering vagueness doctrine, which must consider adequate the role of constitutional principles in closure of interpretation, observing the ideas of coherence and honor of Law. | |
