Contemporary Perspectives on Natural Law: Natural Law as a Limiting Concept / Edition 1

by Ana Marta González

Overview

Resorting to natural law is one way of conveying the philosophical conviction that moral norms are not merely conventional rules. Accordingly, the notion of natural law has a clear metaphysical dimension, since it involves the recognition that human beings do not conceive themselves as sheer products of society and history. And yet, if natural law is to be considered the fundamental law of practical reason, it must show also some intrinsic relationship to history and positive law. The essays in this book examine this tension between the metaphysical and the practical and how the philosophical elaboration of natural law presents this notion as a "limiting-concept", between metaphysics and ethics, between the mutable and the immutable; between is and ought, and, in connection with the latter, even the tension between politics and eschatology as a double horizon of ethics. This book, contributed to by scholars from Europe and America, is a major contribution to the renewed interest in natural law. It provides the reader with a comprehensive overview of natural law, both from a historical and a systematic point of view. It ranges from the mediaeval synthesis of Aquinas through the early modern elaborations of natural law, up to current discussions on the very possibility and practical relevance of natural law theory for the contemporary mind.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780754660545
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	03/28/2008
Pages:	334
Product dimensions:	6.12(w) x 9.19(h) x (d)

About the Author

Ana Marta González is Vice-Chair of the Department of Philosophy at the University of Navarra, Spain.

Table of Contents

Introduction; Part 1 The Concept of Natural Law; Chapter 1 Natural Law as a Limiting Concept: A Reading of Thomas Aquinas, Ana Marta González; Part 2 Historical Studies; Chapter 2 Natural Law and the Human City, Russell Hittinger; Chapter 3 The Formal Fundament of Natural Law in the Golden Age: The case of Vázquez and Suárez, Juan Cruz Cruz; Chapter 4 Natural Law Without Metaphysics: A Protestant Tradition, Knud Haakonssen; Chapter 5 Natural Law and Obligation in Hutcheson and Kant, Jeffrey Edwards; Chapter 6 Spontaneity and the Law of Nature: Leibniz and Pre-critical Kant, María Jesús Soto-Bruna; Chapter 7 Kant’s Conception of Natural Right, Alejandro G. Vigo; Chapter 8 The Right of Freedom regarding Nature in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, Montserrat Herrero; Part 3 Controversial Issues about Natural Law; Chapter 9 Natural Law and Practical Philosophy: The Presence of a Theological Concept in Moral Knowledge, Alfredo Cruz Prados; Chapter 10 First Principles and Practical Philosophy, Alejandro Llano; Chapter 11 The Relativity of Goodness: A Prolegomenon to a Rapprochement between Virtue Ethics and Natural Law Theory, Christopher Martin; Chapter 12 Does the Naturalistic Fallacy Reach Natural Law?, Urbano Ferrer; Chapter 13 Human Universality and Natural Law, Carmelo Vigna; Part 4 Natural Law and Science; Chapter 14 Difficulties on Modern for Natural Law Based Conceptions of Nature, Richard F. Hassing; Chapter 15 Evolution, Semiosis and Ethics: Rethinking the Context of Natural Law, John Deely; Chapter 16 Teleology: Inorganic and Organic, David S. Oderberg; Chapter 17 The Unrelinquishability of Teleology, Robert Spaemann;