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Defeasibility is a problem which is on the agenda of many fields of knowledge including logic, epistemology, and moral philosophy, to name but a few. In recent years, a great many jurisprudential works have also, more or less directly, dealt with defeasibility in the legal domain. However, the substantial amount of research on this topic has not yet produced a systematic treatment of the several phenomena referred to under the general heading of 'defeasibility'. In fact, one often has the impression that the use of the same expression to refer to different, though sometimes interrelated, phenomena brings about a number of conceptual confusions. In light of these issues, this book aims to shed some light on the different meanings of 'defeasibility' and clarify the scope of the different 'objects' which are referred to by this expression. To this end we have invited some of the most prominent legal philosophers in the Anglo-American and Continental traditions to deal with a specific aspect of what is understood by 'defeasibility' in the legal domain,1 or in philosophical or logical domains which are presupposed by jurisprudents when coping with such a phenomenon. This explains and justifies the structure of the book, as we will see in the following paragraphs.
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