The “Salvation Plank” Mental Experiment in the History of Philosophy and Jurisprudence: Carneades, Pufendorf, et al.

Abstract

Through multi-scale mental experiments in philosophy and legal science, existential and legal conflicts are constructed in their extreme and simultaneously figurative form. The study of the thought experiment known as the Pufendorf plank of salvation, conducted in the context of microhistory and based on the methodology of hermeneutics and historical criticism, showed that it originated in the creativity of Carneades, an orator and supporter of the pyrrhonist trend of Greek philosophy of the 2nd century BC. The decisive factor in the unofficial recognition of the German lawyer of the XVII century Samuel Pufendorf authorship presumably was the public and academic success of his theory in general and the well-balanced, taking into account the circumstances of the time, construction of the institution of excused necessity in particular. The allegory of the plank of salvation was used by speculators of different epochs and schools, who adjusted its fabula in their own mode and interpreted its semantic potential in different ways. Jurisprudence is interested in the contours and mechanisms of objectified and formalized regulation of socially relevant human activity, while philosophy is interested in the measure of combinability of its internal and external determinants. Both lines converge at the point of analyzing borderline situations, one of the varieties of which is the infliction of harm in a state of extreme necessity. Therefore, the hypothetical model of the salvation plank is actualized at the points of intersection of philosophical and theoretical-legal forms of rational reflection.