Abstract:The attempt to understand morality in the legalistic terms of a natural law is ancient but is now mostly associated with the formulation given it by Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. Earl...The attempt to understand morality in the legalistic terms of a natural law is ancient but is now mostly associated with the formulation given it by Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. Earlier natural law is commonly seen as leading up to Aquinas's paradigmatic version, whereas later natural law is understood as deriving from it. This approach has resulted in long-standing disputes about the status of Protestant natural law vis-à-vis Thomism, disputes generally centring on the question of the originality of Hugo Grotius, commonly considered 'the father of modern natural law'. It is easy to understand why there should be such disagreements. The sources reveal an extraordinary degree of continuity between scholastic natural law (not only Aquinas's) and the natural law doctrines that dominated Protestant Europe during the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries. Yet it seemed to moral philosophers of these centuries, especially to the modern natural lawyers themselves, that something decisively new happened with Grotius. Protestant natural law was seen as a distinct school of moral philosophy, until the history of philosophy was redrawn by Kant and by others working in the light of his philosophy.Read More
Publication Year: 1996
Publication Date: 1996-02-23
Language: en
Type: book-chapter
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 3
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