Faculty of Law’s honorary doctor Lennart Åqvist dies
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Lennart Åqvist has died at the age of 86. He was an honorary doctor at the Faculty of Law, docent in practical philosophy and visiting professor at several universities abroad.
Lennart obtained his PhD in 1960 with a doctoral thesis on the 18th-century philosopher Richard Price’s moral philosophy. Early on, Lennart realised the value of formal logic for philosophical analysis. As a logician within his own speciality, philosophical logic, he took his place among the international elite.
His research was wide-ranging and he made substantial contributions in various fields, including linguistic philosophy, moral philosophy, aesthetics, history of philosophy and, in particular, philosophy of law. Through the agency of two law professors, Per Olof Ekelöf i Uppsala och Jan Hellner in Stockholm, he became integrated into the Swedish sphere of jurisprudence.
When philosophers turn to law and jurisprudence, it is often very much at a generalist level. To Lennart’s great credit in the philosophy of law, he chose to investigate fundamental concepts in specialist fields of law. In this area, too, he demonstrated his great breadth. His pioneering works Kausalitet och culpaansvar inom en logiskt rekonstruerad skadeståndsrätt (Causation and Liability for Negligence in a logically reconstructed Law of Torts: a study in analytic philosophy of law, 1973) and Causing Harm (jointly with P. Mullock, 1989) clarify such notions as action, causation and culpability. He also undertook logical reconstructions of the theory of third-party conflicts in property law and the theory of evidence grading in legal evidence studies.
In 1992, the title of Honorary Doctor of Law was conferred on Lennart Åqvist by the Faculty of Law in Uppsala.
Maria Cicilaki