Kategoria BISAC: Law >> Natural Law

The essays in this volume concern the topic of legal rights, how they are related to morality, the place of rights on moral theory, and the legal recognition of rights.

Edmund Burke claimed to be a practical politician, rather than a theorist. Nevertheless, says the author, Burke held consistent political principles which form a coherent political theory. By examining concepts such as natural laws, natural society, civil society, and history in Burke's speeches and writings, the author comes to some conclusions about Burke's political theory and its relation to commonly accepted eighteenth-century political doctrines. Succinct and balanced, this study will be of particular interest to political theorists and historians.

Jeremy Bentham's law of marriage is firmly based on the principle of utility, which claims that all human actions are governed by a wish to gain pleasure and avoid pain, and on the proposition that men and women are equal. He wrote in a late eighteenth century context of Enlightenment debate about the status of women, marriage and the family, as did his contemporaries Wollstonecraft and More. Bentham responded particularly to the thought of Milton, Locke, Hume, Paley and to the French thinkers Montesquieu, Diderot and Rousseau. These were the turbulent years leading to the French...

Aristotle and Natural Law lays out a new theoretical approach which distinguishes between the notions of 'interpretation, ' 'appropriation, ' 'negotiation' and 'reconstruction' of the meaning of texts and their component concepts. These categories are then deployed in an examination of the role which the concept of natural law is used by Aristotle in a number of key texts. The book argues that Aristotle appropriated the concept of natural law, first formulated by the defenders of naturalism in the 'nature versus convention debate' in classical Athens. Thereby he contributed to the...

Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) hat in De jure naturae et gentium, dem wichtigsten Lehrbuch des Naturrechts in seiner Epoche, seine Doktrinen von der persona moralis und von der Soziabilitat des Menschen philosophisch, theologisch und historisch begrundet. Frank Bohling legt in seinem Materialienband neben Beitragen zu Pufendorfs Biographie den Stellenkommentar zu den acht Buchern dieses Werkes (Bande 4.1 und 4.2 unserer Ausgabe) vor.

Wertheimer attempts to move beyond previous theories of coercion by conducting a fairly extensive survey of the way in which cases involving coercion have been treated by American courts. This impressive project occupies the first half of the book, where he makes a convincing case that there is a fairly unified 'theory of coercion' at work in adjudication, past and present. This legal theory, however, is not entirely adequate for the purposes of social and political philosophy, and the last half of the book develops Wertheimer's more comprehensive philosophical theory.

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