Author: Steven J. Jensen
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 081322733X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 249
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Book Description
Knowing the Natural Law traces the thought of Aquinas from an understanding of human nature to a knowledge of the human good, from there to an account of ought-statements, and finally to choice, which issues in human actions. The much discussed article on the precepts of the natural law (I-II, 94, 2) provides the framework for a natural law rooted in human nature and in speculative knowledge. Practical knowledge is itself threefold: potentially practical knowledge, virtually practical knowledge, and fully practical knowledge.
Author: Rev. Stephen L. Brock
Publisher: Wipf and Stock Publishers
ISBN: 153264731X
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 245
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Book Description
If there is any one author in the history of moral thought who has come to be associated with the idea of natural law, it is Saint Thomas Aquinas. Many things have been written about Aquinas's natural law teaching, and from many different perspectives. The aim of this book is to help see it from his own perspective. That is why the focus is metaphysical. Aquinas's whole moral doctrine is laden with metaphysics, and his natural law teaching especially so, because it is all about first principles. The book centers on how Aquinas thinks the first principles of practical reason, which for him are what make up natural law, function as laws. It is a controversial question, and the book engages a variety of readers of Aquinas, including Francisco Suarez, Jacques Maritain, prominent analytical philosophers, Straussians, and the initiators of the New Natural Law theory. Among the issues addressed are the relation between natural law and natural inclination, how far natural law depends on knowledge of human nature, what its obligatory force consists in, and, above all, how it is related to what for Aquinas is the first principle of all being, the divine will.
Author: Richard Berquist
Publisher: Catholic University of America Press
ISBN: 0813232422
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 264
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Book Description
From Human Dignity to Natural Law shows how the whole of the natural law, as understood in the Aristotelian Thomistic tradition, is contained implicitly in human dignity. Human dignity means existing for one’s own good (the common good as well as one’s individual good), and not as a mere means to an alien good. But what is the true human good? This question is answered with a careful analysis of Aristotle’s definition of happiness. The natural law can then be understood as the precepts that guide us in achieving happiness. To show that human dignity is a reality in the nature of things and not a mere human invention, it is necessary to show that human beings exist by nature for the achievement of the properly human good in which happiness is found. This implies finality in nature. Since contemporary natural science does not recognize final causality, the book explains why living things, as least, must exist for a purpose and why the scientific method, as currently understood, is not able to deal with this question. These reflections will also enable us to respond to a common criticism of natural law theory: that it attempts to derive statements of what ought to be from statements about what is. After defining the natural law and relating it to human or positive law, Richard Berquist considers Aquinas’s formulation of the first principle of the natural law. It then discusses the love commandments to love God above all things and to love one’s neighbor as oneself as the first precepts of the natural law. Subsequent chapters are devoted to clarifying and defending natural law precepts concerned with the life issues, with sexual morality and marriage, and with fundamental natural rights. From Human Dignity to Natural Law concludes with a discussion of alternatives to the natural law.
Author: John Lawrence Hill
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1621640175
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 312
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Book Description
The "natural law" worldview developed over the course of almost two thousand years beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with St. Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century. This tradition holds that the world is ordered, intelligible and good, that there are objective moral truths which we can know and that human beings can achieve true happiness only by following our inborn nature, which draws us toward our own perfection. Most accounts of the natural law are based on a God-centered understanding of the world. After the Natural Law traces this tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and then describes how and why modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke and Hobbes began to chip away at this foundation. The book argues that natural law is a necessary foundation for our most important moral and political values – freedom, human rights, equality, responsibility and human dignity, among others. Without a theory of natural law, these values lose their coherence: we literally cannot make sense of them given the assumptions of modern philosophy. Part I of the book traces the development of natural law theory from Plato and Aristotle through the crowning achievement of Thomas Aquinas. Part II explores how modern philosophers have systematically chipped away at the only coherent foundation for these values. As a result, our most important moral and political ideals today are incoherent. Modern political and moral thinkers have been led either to dilute the meaning of such terms as freedom or the moral good – or abandon these ideas altogether. Thus, modern philosophy and political thought are leading us either toward anarchy or totalitarianism. The conclusion, entitled "Why God Matters", shows how even the philosophical assumptions of the natural law depend on a personal God.
Author: Steven J. Jensen
Publisher: CUA Press
ISBN: 0813221455
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 217
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Book Description
Living the Good Life presents a brief introduction to virtue and vice, self-control and weakness, misery and happiness.
Author: J. Budziszewski
Publisher: Ignatius Press
ISBN: 1586174819
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 318
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Book Description
Professor J. Budziszewski questions the modern assumption that moral truths are unknowable. With clear and logical arguments he rehabilitates the natural law tradition and restores confidence in a moral code based upon human nature. --from publisher description.
Author: J. Budziszewski
Publisher: InterVarsity Press
ISBN: 0830877800
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 252
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Book Description
J. Budziszewski presents and defends the natural-law tradition by expounding the work of leading architects of the theory, including Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas and John Locke.
Author: Douglas Kries
Publisher: Lexington Books
ISBN: 9780739120378
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 218
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Book Description
The Problem of Natural Law examines the understanding of conscience offered by Thomas Aquinas, who provided the classic statement of natural law. The book suggests that natural law theory could be improved by bracketing Thomistic conscience and then shows how a natural law pos...
Author: Anthony J. Lisska
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 342
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Book Description
This new critique of Aquinas's theory of natural law discusses the background of the theory in Aristotle and advances new interpretations of contemporary legal issues which hark back to Aquinas.
Author: Stephen J. Grabill
Publisher: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing
ISBN: 0802863132
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 321
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Book Description
Is knowledge of right and wrong written on the human heart? Do people know God from the world around them? Does natural knowledge contribute to Christian doctrine? While these questions of natural theology and natural law have historically been part of theological reflection, the radical reliance of twentieth-century Protestant theologians on revelation has eclipsed this historic connection. Stephen Grabill attempts the treacherous task of reintegrating Reformed Protestant theology with natural law by appealing to Reformation-era theologians such as John Calvin, Peter Martyr Vermigli, Johannes Althusius, and Francis Turretin, who carried over and refined the traditional understanding of this key doctrine. Rediscovering the Natural Law in Reformed Theological Ethics calls Christian ethicists, theologians, and laypersons to take another look at this vital element in the history of Christian ethical thought.
