“Philosophy of crime” or “philosophy of punishment”?

Abstract

The question stated in the title of the article is posed against the background of the opinion taking root in criminal jurisprudence about the redundancy of substantiation of the philosophy of criminal law in connection with the presence and mass recognition in humanitarian knowledge of two independent and self — sufficient philosophies — “philosophy of crime” and “philosophy of punishment”. Verification of this judgment revealed the absence of the considered “philosophies” of their own genesis and rational grounds. Their appearance followed after in the XVIII–XIX centuries. criminologists convinced themselves that crime and punishment constitute the basic concepts of criminal law and exhaust its content. Despite a different paradigm of worldview, philosophers, sociologists and historians have followed the path of “crime and punishment”. Within the framework of the newly emerged philosophies, some began to search for the best places to treat a person from criminal vices, while others described the mechanisms of deviant behavior. An excursion into history also helped to reveal the non-philosophical origin of the so-called criminal philosophies. Systemic philosophers who have been engaged in understanding being as a whole have no relation to the “philosophies” under study. The copyrights to them belong to industry lawyers and their followers, who are used to thinking about the world around them through a terminological series limited by the “crime — punishment” paradigm. The experimental hacking of the mentioned ideas made it possible to reveal that the philosophy of crime is a meaningless alogism, and the philosophy of punishment can only correspond to the teleology of the instrument. These “philosophies” give legal science no more than what is already available in a self-sufficient volume in branch disciplines. Philosophy, of course, participates in the discussion of such vital issues as crime and punishment. But the questions themselves cannot claim to form separate disciplines because of their fragmentation and extraction from a more integral education. Philosophy appears there and then, when there is a need to think in the format of the entire universe and search for a person in need of law in it.

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