After the natural law : how the classical worldview supports our modern moral and political values / John Lawrence Hill.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Hill, John L. (John Lawrence), 1960- author.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Natural law.

Physical Description:

309 pages ; 23 cm

Other Title:

How the classical worldview supports our modern moral and political views

Place of Publication:

San Francisco, CA : Ignatius Press, [2016]

Summary:

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. -- Provided by publisher.

Contents:

Part 1. The classical worldview: The first materialists

The classical worldview before Christianity

Thomas Aquinas and the natural law

The classical conception of the person

Part 2. The moral and political consequences of the decline of the classical worldview: The birth of the modern : four seminal thinkers

The problem of the disappearing self

Doing without free will

The disintegration of moral truth and the unraveling of law

The lost foundation of our modern moral and political values.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references (pages 275-287) and index.

ISBN:

1621640175

9781621640172

OCLC:

936344847