(Source: Routledge)
Routledge is
publishing a new book on the 18th century Italian jurist Giambattista
Vico and his views on natural law.
ABOUT THE BOOK
This book introduces
the thought of Giambattista Vico (1668-1744) into the discussion about natural
law. For many critics, natural law is not natural but a façade behind which
lurks the supernatural – that is, revealed religion. While current notions of
natural law are based on either Aristotelian/Thomistic principles or on
Enlightenment rationalism, the book shows how Vico was the only natural law
thinker to draw on the Roman legal tradition, rather than on Greek or
Enlightenment philosophy. Specifically, the book addresses how Vico, drawing
his inspiration from Roman history, incorporated both rhetoric and religion
into a dynamic concept of natural law grounded in what he called the sensus
communis: the entire repertoire of values, images, institutions, and even prejudices
that a community takes for granted. Vico denied that natural law could ever
furnish a definitive answer to moral problems in the social/public sphere.
Rather he maintained that such problems had to be debated in the wider arena of
the sensus communis. For Vico, as this book argues, natural law principles
emerged from these debates; they did not resolve them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
John Schaeffer
is Emeritus Professor of English at Northern Illinois, US
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
INTRODUCTION
EXCAVATING ROMAN
LEGAL HISTORY
CHAPTER ONE:
VICO’S LEGAL MILIEU
CHAPTER TWO:
VICO’S UNIVERSAL LAW: RELIGION, RHETORIC AND THE ROMAN PARADIGM
CHAPTER THREE:
NATURAL LAW IN THE FIRST NEW SCIENCE
CHAPTER FOUR:
NATURAL LAW LAND THE REVISED NEW SCIENCE
CHAPTER FIVE:
REPRISE: THE SENSES OF THE SENSUS COMMUNIS
NATURAL LAW AND
SENSUS COMMUNIS
CHAPTER SIX: THE
ARISTOTELIAN-THOMIST TRADITION
CHAPTER SEVEN:
VICO’S PLACE IN THE NATURAL LAW TRADITION
CHAPTER EIGHT:
CONCLUSION: NATURAL LAW IN THE BARBARISM OF REFLECTION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
More information here
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