Black Natural Law
Title | Black Natural Law PDF eBook |
Author | Vincent W. Lloyd |
Publisher | Oxford University Press |
Pages | 201 |
Release | 2016-05-02 |
Genre | Political Science |
ISBN | 0190610581 |
Black Natural Law offers a new way of understanding the African American political tradition. Iconoclastically attacking left (including James Baldwin and Audre Lorde), right (including Clarence Thomas and Ben Carson), and center (Barack Obama), Vincent William Lloyd charges that many Black leaders today embrace secular, white modes of political engagement, abandoning the deep connections between religious, philosophical, and political ideas that once animated Black politics. By telling the stories of Frederick Douglass, Anna Julia Cooper, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Martin Luther King, Jr., Lloyd shows how appeals to a higher law, or God's law, have long fueled Black political engagement. Such appeals do not seek to implement divine directives on earth; rather, they pose a challenge to the wisdom of the world, and they mobilize communities for collective action. Black natural law is deeply democratic: while charismatic leaders may provide the occasion for reflection and mobilization, all are capable of discerning the higher law using our human capacities for reason and emotion. At a time when continuing racial injustice poses a deep moral challenge, the most powerful intellectual resources in the struggle for justice have been abandoned. Black Natural Law recovers a rich tradition, and it examines just how this tradition was forgotten. A Black intellectual class emerged that was disconnected from social movement organizing and beholden to white interests. Appeals to higher law became politically impotent: overly rational or overly sentimental. Recovering the Black natural law tradition provides a powerful resource for confronting police violence, mass incarceration, and today's gross racial inequities. Black Natural Law will change the way we understand natural law, a topic central to the Western ethical and political tradition. While drawing particularly on African American resources, Black Natural Law speaks to all who seek politics animated by justice.
The Threads of Natural Law
Title | The Threads of Natural Law PDF eBook |
Author | Francisco José Contreras |
Publisher | Springer Science & Business Media |
Pages | 255 |
Release | 2012-12-13 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 9400756569 |
The notion of “natural law” has repeatedly furnished human beings with a shared grammar in times of moral and cultural crisis. Stoic natural law, for example, emerged precisely when the Ancient World lost the Greek polis, which had been the point of reference for Plato's and Aristotle's political philosophy. In key moments such as this, natural law has enabled moral and legal dialogue between peoples and traditions holding apparently clashing world-views. This volume revisits some of these key moments in intellectual and social history, partly with an eye to extracting valuable lessons for ideological conflicts in the present and perhaps near future. The contributions to this volume discuss both historical and contemporary schools of natural law. Topics on historical schools of natural law include: how Aristotelian theory of rules paved the way for the birth of the idea of "natural law"; the idea's first mature account in Cicero's work; the tension between two rival meanings of “man’s rational nature” in Aquinas’ natural law theory; and the scope of Kant’s allusions to “natural law”. Topics on contemporary natural law schools include: John Finnis's and Germain Grisez's “new natural law theory”; natural law theories in a "broader" sense, such as Adolf Reinach’s legal phenomenology; Ortega y Gasset’s and Scheler’s “ethical perspectivism”; the natural law response to Kelsen’s conflation of democracy and moral relativism; natural law's role in 20th century international law doctrine; Ronald Dworkin’s understanding of law as “a branch of political morality”; and Alasdair Macintyre’s "virtue"-based approach to natural law.
The Threads of Natural Law
Title | The Threads of Natural Law PDF eBook |
Author | |
Publisher | |
Pages | 266 |
Release | 2012-12-17 |
Genre | |
ISBN | 9789400756571 |
St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition
Title | St. Thomas Aquinas and the Natural Law Tradition PDF eBook |
Author | John Goyette |
Publisher | CUA Press |
Pages | 337 |
Release | 2004-09 |
Genre | Law |
ISBN | 0813213991 |
To explore and evaluate the current revival, this volume brings together many of the foremost scholars on natural law. They examine the relation between Thomistic natural law and the larger philosophical and theological tradition. Furthermore, they assess the contemporary relevance of St. Thomas's natural law doctrine to current legal and political philosophy.
Natural Law and Theology
Title | Natural Law and Theology PDF eBook |
Author | Charles E. Curran |
Publisher | |
Pages | 488 |
Release | 1991 |
Genre | Law |
ISBN |
Biblical Natural Law
Title | Biblical Natural Law PDF eBook |
Author | Matthew Levering |
Publisher | Oxford University Press on Demand |
Pages | 269 |
Release | 2008-03-20 |
Genre | Philosophy |
ISBN | 0199535299 |
An introduction to natural law theory and a challenge to re-think current biblical scholarship on the topic. Levering establishes the relevance of a biblical worldview to the contemporary pursuit of a moral life and locates his argument in the context of the philosophical development of natural law theory from Cicero to Nietzsche.
A Shared Morality
Title | A Shared Morality PDF eBook |
Author | Craig A. Boyd |
Publisher | Baker Books |
Pages | 261 |
Release | 2007-11-01 |
Genre | Religion |
ISBN | 1585585092 |
Morality based on natural law has a long tradition, and has proven to be quite resilient in the face of numerous attacks and challenges over the years. Those challenges are no less serious today, which leads one to ask if natural law is still a viable foundation for ethics. Craig Boyd provides a contemporary defense of natural law theory against modern challenges from the arenas of science, religion, culture, and philosophy. In his analysis, he defends many of the classical elements of natural law, but also takes into account the contributions of scientific discoveries about human nature. He concludes that natural law is a necessary but not sufficient basis for ethics that must be accompanied by a theory of virtue.