civil law

As a student of philosophy, the fundamental difference between the Anglo-Saxon empiricist and the continental rationalist philosophical tempers was impressed upon me. The Anglo-Saxon starts with the obvious facts and arrives at the truth through a process of analysis and trial and error. Philosophy is the finding of bad reasons for what we believe upon instinct. The continental approach is to start with clear ideas and to arrive at the truth through a process of synthesis. Philosophy is an incontrovertible system of certain truths. Many years later as a student of trust taxation, I disc...