The Changing Profile of the Natural Law

It has more than once been observed that funeral orations for the natural law have always been premature. ! The implication that the concept has a continuing vitality, giving the lie to the prophets of its doom, is justification for yet another book on a subject, now as much as ever in the two and a half millenia of its history a matter of controversy. The history of the natural law has often been written -or at least the history of the concept in the Western European Greco 2 Roman tradition. This study does not claim to be a history, although its method is primarily historical and its subject is an idea that, more perhaps than most, has been shaped by its history. The omissions, Hobbes, Vico, Kant, Hegel for example, amply demonstrate that this is not a systematic history. On the other hand it accepts that In an orderly preparation for the study of natural law the most impor tant step would be to list the main modifications undergone by the notion of natural law as a result of doctrinal and historical cir cumstances? 1 Bergbohm, Jurisprudenz und Rechtsphilosophie, cited in a. M. Manser, Vas Natu"echt in Thomistischer Beleuchtung, p. 1; cf. A. P. d'Entreves, Natural Law, p. 13: "It was declared dead, never to rise again from its ashes. Yet natural law has survived and still calls for discussion. " 2 A.

Contenu
I. Beginnings.- A. The Pre-Socratics.- B. The Sophists and Socrates.- C. Plato.- D. Aristotle.- II. The Profile Emerges.- A. The Stoics.- B. Cicero.- C. The Roman Jurisconsults.- D. The Special Case of Ulpian.- III. The Christian Face of the Natural Law.- A. St. Paul and the New Testament.- B. The Church Fathers.- C. St. Augustine.- D. St. Isidore of Seville.- IV. Medieval Canonists and Civilians.- A. Gratian.- B. The Medieval Civilians.- C. The Decretists.- V. Fresh Lineaments of the Natural Law.- A. Some Early Scholastic Theologians.- B. The Franciscan School and Albert the Great.- C. Scholastic Terminology: synderesis and Conscience.- VI. Aquinas Faces the Natural Law Tradition.- A. Aquinas on synderesis.- B. Aquinas and the Definitions of the Natural Law.- C. Natural Law and the Principles of Morality.- VII. Aquinas Makes Up His Mind.- A. The Notion of Law.- B. The Eternal Law.- C. The Natural Law and Its Precepts.- D. Primary and Secondary Precepts of the Natural Law.- E. The Variability of the Natural Law.- VIII. The Breaking of the Profile and its Re-making.- A. Moderate Nominalism: Scotus.- B. Nominalist Developments: William of Ockham, Gregory of Rimini.- C. The Reformation and the Scholastic Silver Age.- IX. The False Face of the Natural Law.- A. Hugo Grotius and the 'Impious Hypothesis'.- B. Natural Law in the Age of Reason.- C. Another Face of Natural Law: Human Rights.- X. Natural Law: A Twentieth-Century Profile?.- A. Natural Law Emerging from Eclipse.- B. Re-shaping the Features of Thomistic Natural Law.- C. Areas of discussion.- D. A Rehabilitated Natural Law?.- Name Index.