Natural Law Modernized / / David Braybrooke.

• Superior document: Title is part of eBook package: De Gruyter UTP eBook-Package Backlist 2000-2015
• VerfasserIn: Braybrooke, David,
• Place / Publishing House: Toronto : : University of Toronto Press, , [2016]; ©2001
• Year of Publication: 2016
• Language: English
• Series: Toronto Studies in Philosophy
• Physical Description: 1 online resource

Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau are classic modern philosophers, widely consulted in matters of ethics and political theory. In this provocative study David Braybrooke challenges received scholarly opinion by arguing that these canonical theorists took St Thomas Aquinas as their point of reference, reinforcing rather than departing from his natural law theory.The natural law theory of St Thomas Aquinas is essentially a secular theory, says Braybrooke. He argues that Hobbes, Locke, Hume, and Rousseau share a core of thought that not only has roots in St Thomas but offers an alternative to other ethical theories now current. According to Braybrooke, this surviving and reinforced core qualifies as an ethical theory viable by the most sophisticated standards, meeting the main challenges of analytical metaethics, and thus standing up to the scrutiny that any ethical theory must undergo in contemporary philosophical discussions. Braybrooke's study takes the reader into a rich and compelling intellectual universe, one in which medieval natural law theory, widely ignored as obsolete, survives robustly through the modern canon and into the third millennium.

Table of Contents

Frontmatter -- Contents -- Preface -- 1. Did Medieval Natural Law Die Out? -- 2. Locke's Natural Law and St Thomas's: Secular in Content, Empirical in Foundation -- 3. Rousseau and St Thomas on the Common Good -- 4. Hobbes Allied with St Thomas: An Axiomatic System of Laws -- 5. David Hume: Natural Law Theorist and Moral Realist -- 6. From Private Property in Hume and Locke to the Universality of Natural Laws -- 7. With Us Still: Natural Law Theory Illustrated Today in the Work of David Copp -- 8. Moral Education -- 9. Epilogue: The Lasting Strength of Natural Law Theory in Jurisprudence -- Appendix: Natural Law in Philosophical Traditions outside the Christian West -- Notes -- Index