Brazilian Tax Law and Interdisciplinarity

Perspectives, Possibilities and Challenges

Abstract

The paper analyzes the perspectives of approximation of the theories of interdisciplinarity in relation to the historical development of the legal discipline called Tax Law. The article also uses the hypothetical-deductive method to inquire whether the science of tax law allows interdisciplinary contributions. The scientific conception of the discipline, permeated by the relentless pursuit of autonomy in the face of other branches of knowledge (including legal ones), has not, especially in the current environment, removed perspectives that flirt with knowledge gained in other fields of knowledge. The question, however, is whether these “flirts” would be genuinely interdisciplinary efforts, especially considering modern interdisciplinary pedagogical and epistemological theories. The conclusion, following investigations based on domestic and foreign tax literature, is that interdisciplinarity itself is still embryonic in the field of taxation, although some genuinely interdisciplinary efforts (and the prospect of creating “interdisciplines”) already appear among scholars of the taxation, even if these eventually are not connected to interdisciplinary theories.