Natural Law and the Mind

The ways that Thomism has historically thought about knowledge and habit in Thomas Aquinas's ethics have become increasingly destabilised. This article briefly documents this destabilisation before considering three images that have emerged in recent engagements with the ethics of Aquinas on moral knowledge and action. The three images are brought to bear on a discussion of what Aquinas may have meant by calling synderesis a ‘natural habit’. The first image is John Milbank's and Catherine Pickstock's image of God as country bumpkin and it follows Aquinas's own description of the way God knows particulars out of divine simplicity. They argue that human knowledge of particulars comes from participation in the mind of God. This is participation in eternal law from which natural law is derived and so natural law cannot constitute a separate, sufficient system of moral knowledge. With the second image, the bricoleur, Jeffrey Stout argues that system-building was far from the kind of work that Aquinas was about, despite appearances that have disguised how freely Aquinas himself made use of the moral resources at his disposal. The third image, the forester, is deployed by Charles Pinches intentionally to improve on some of the problems with Stout's image. The Christian moral agent develops habits of mind that both aid in right perception, and hence right knowledge, and depend on right perception for right action. A discussion of this apparent paradox reveals something of the complexity of theoretical knowledge and practical skills that are involved in moral reasoning for Aquinas.

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Thomasius (Thomas), Christian (1655–1728)

Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy ◽

10.4324/9780415249126-da077-1 ◽

2018 ◽

Author(s):

Knud Haakonssen

Keyword(s):

Seventeenth Century ◽

Natural Law ◽

Public And Private ◽

God's Will ◽

The Public ◽

German Enlightenment ◽

Modern Natural ◽

Natural Law Theory ◽

Law And Morality ◽

The Mind

Christian Thomasius’ stature as the ‘founder’ of the German Enlightenment has been the source of much debate. His many essays dealing with issues in moral enlightenment and law reform (bigamy, witchcraft, torture, heresy, adultery, the use of the vernacular and so on) certainly single him out from other seventeenth-century writers. He was the public philosopher par excellence, a suitable match for August Hermann Francke, the great public theologian. Both men spent most of their career in Halle (in Brandenburg), and it was there that Francke institutionalized pietism, just as Thomasius propagated secular natural law theory. Despite many tensions, pietism and modern natural law thereby fused into a social duty-ethics that was of the greatest importance in shaping the modern Prussian state. The basis for natural law was God’s will and it was the attempt to follow this law that made humanity a moral species. Since humankind could not have any certain knowledge of the content of God’s law, the natural powers of the mind would have to be relied upon, and Thomasius’ thought was an investigation into the nature and social effect of these powers. His best-known result was a series of linked divisions between law and morality, between public and private spheres, between external and internal obligation, and between action and intention.

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Fundamental Operations of Language

Cadernos de Linguística ◽

10.25189/2675-4916.2020.v1.n1.id271 ◽

2020 ◽

Vol 1 (1) ◽

pp. 01-13

Author(s):

Noam Chomsky

Keyword(s):

Natural Law ◽

Computational Efficiency ◽

Natural Laws ◽

Computational Operation ◽

The Mind ◽

General Architecture

20 years ago, in lectures in Brasilia, I suggested that we might someday discover that the Faculty of Language (FL) is “beautifully designed, a near-perfect solution to the conditions imposed by the general architecture of the mind-brain in which it is inserted, another illustration of how natural laws work out in wondrous ways,” so that language is rather like a snowflake, and the near-perfect design can be expected to impose inefficiency of use. I added that “these are fables,” with the redeeming value that they “might even turn out to have some elements of validity. In the years since, solid reasons have been found to suggest that these hopes were understated, and that the “fable” – the Strong Minimalist Thesis – appears to have considerable validity. A number of striking and puzzling properties of FL – “universals of language” in the contemporary sense – have been shown to derive from the simplest computational operation, Merge, along with conditions of computational efficiency that are in effect part of natural law. And as anticipated, they do indeed impose communicative inefficiency.

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The Place of Machiavelli in the History of Political Thought

American Political Science Review ◽

10.2307/1950005 ◽

1943 ◽

Vol 37 (4) ◽

pp. 626-641 ◽

Cited By ~ 2

Author(s):

Charles N. R. McCoy

Keyword(s):

Eighteenth Century ◽

Natural Law ◽

Political Thought ◽

History Of Political Thought ◽

Greek City ◽

Marsilius Of Padua ◽

History Of ◽

City States ◽

The Mind ◽

The Church

The chief reason for the lack of intelligibility in a course in the history of political thought is the absence of any standard by which the great writers in the field may justly be compared. The usual course in the history of political thought is thoroughly historical and scrupulously indifferent to philosophical analysis; at best, a semblance of comparative analysis is achieved by simply telling the student that different needs of different periods suggest different and equally valid theoretical constructions. The question of natural law, for example, is handled in something like the following fashion. The Aristotelian notion of natural law is no sooner inadequately in the mind of the student than it fails to survive the downfall of the Greek city states. The student is told that Aristotle's notion of natural law restricted his vision and blinded him to the inevitable growth of the empire of Philip, his own student. The Stoics, whose views were perfected by Cicero, held to a notion of natural law much more in keeping with the needs of a world civilization. The Church adopted the Stoic conception of natural law. Subsequently, after the writings of Aristotle had been discovered, St. Thomas Aquinas wedded natural law to the law of the Church. The Renaissance and Reformation liberated men's minds from the shackles of Mediaeval Scholasticism. The concept of natural law came gradually to be abandoned; it is already repudiated in the writings of William of Occam and Marsilius of Padua, and its disappearance is complete in Machiavelli. Accustomed to the tradition of 1066 and All That, the student gathers that this disappearance was “a good thing.” In the eighteenth century, there is a revival of natural law.

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How Homo economicus lost her mind and how we can revive her

Behavioral and Brain Sciences ◽

10.1017/s0140525x1800033x ◽

2018 ◽

Vol 41 ◽

Author(s):

Peter DeScioli

Keyword(s):

Economic Thought ◽

History Of Economic Thought ◽

Homo Economicus ◽

Economic Theories ◽

Target Article ◽

History Of ◽

The Mind ◽

And Behavior

AbstractThe target article by Boyer & Petersen (B&P) contributes a vital message: that people have folk economic theories that shape their thoughts and behavior in the marketplace. This message is all the more important because, in the history of economic thought, Homo economicus was increasingly stripped of mental capacities. Intuitive theories can help restore the mind of Homo economicus.

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