Overview

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.

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9781532647291

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When the living scholar who knows best the works of Thomas Aquinas says that his own earlier thought in a certain regard has evolved, academics especially, but also others, must take notice. That scholar is Fr. Stephen Brock; this book is where he explains--with great clarity and subtlety--this development in his understanding of Aquinas's teaching on the relationship between the natural law and God's eternal law. --Kevin L. Flannery, SJ, Professor of the History of Ancient Philosophy, Pontifical Gregorian University This book is of the utmost importance for anyone interested in contemporary disputes over Aquinas's understanding of the natural law and moral obligation. With his usual command of Aquinas's texts, Stephen Brock gives a substantial and new argument for the thesis that the natural law is a law in the strictest sense. --Thomas M. Osborne Jr., Chair, Department of Philosophy, University of St. Thomas Stephen Brock has written a masterful study of what it means for the natural law to be both natural and a law. Scholars have struggled to understand Aquinas's theory of the natural law, raising questions about the natural law's binding force, its relationship to God and to our natural inclinations. Brock engages the best of the secondary literature concerning these questions, offering his own insightful and creative interpretation of them. --Michael Sherwin, OP, Professor of Moral Theology and Ethics, University of Freiburg A penetrating and lucid study of Aquinas's metaphysics of natural law. From the outset, it is evident that the reader is under the direction of a master. Highly recommended as a first point of reference on the subject. --Russell Hittinger, Emeritus Professor of Religion, University of Tulsa

Author Information

Stephen L. Brock is Ordinary Professor of Medieval Philosophy at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in Rome. He is the author of Action and Conduct: Thomas Aquinas and the Theory of Action (1998), The Philosophy of Saint Thomas Aquinas: A Sketch (2015), and numerous scholarly articles on Aquinas's thought.

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