Axel Hagerstrom

Axel Anders Theodor Hagerstrom lived from September 6, 1868 to July 7, 1939 and was a Swedish philosopher, born in Vireda in Jonkoping County to a Church of Sweden pastor, who studied at Uppsala University and left theology for philosophy. He taught at Uppsala from 1893 until his retirement in 1933, attacking the philosophical idealism dominant in his day, and is regarded as founder of the quasi-positivistic Uppsala school of philosophy and of the Scandinavian legal realism movement. In legal philosophy he rejected natural law concepts and grounded legal understanding in observable experience rather than abstract principle, an approach carried on by his students Karl Olivecrona, Alf Ross and Anders Vilhelm Lundstedt. He is best known for a position often called value nihilism, arguing that concepts such as right and duty cannot be scientifically verified and are therefore not genuine propositions but mere expressions of emotion, a critique that anticipated later developments in analytic moral philosophy including emotivism.