The Natural law Worldview developed over the course of almost two thousand years beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with St.
The conclusion, entitled Why God Matters, shows how even the philosophical assumptions of the Natural law depend on a personal God..
Thus, Modern philosophy and Political thought are leading us either toward anarchy or totalitarianism.
Modern Political and Moral thinkers have been led either to dilute the meaning of such terms as freedom or the Moral good - or abandon these ideas altogether.
As a result, our most important Moral and Political ideals today are incoherent.
Part II explores how Modern philosophers have systematically chipped away at the only coherent foundation for these values.
Part I of the book traces the development of Natural law theory from Plato and Aristotle through the crowning achievement of Thomas Aquinas.
Without a theory of Natural law, these values lose their coherence: we literally cannot make sense of them given the assumptions of Modern philosophy.
The book argues that Natural law is a necessary foundation for our most important Moral and Political values - freedom, human rights, equality, responsibility and human dignity, among others.
After the Natural Law traces this tradition from Plato and Aristotle to Thomas Aquinas and then describes how and why Modern philosophers such as Descartes, Locke and Hobbes began to chip away at this foundation.
Most accounts of the Natural law are based on a God-centered understanding of the world.
This tradition holds that the world is ordered, intelligible and good, that there are objective Moral truths which we can know and that human beings can achieve true happiness only by following our inborn nature, which draws us toward our own perfection.
Thomas Aquinas in the thirteenth century.
The Natural law Worldview developed over the course of almost two thousand years beginning with Plato and Aristotle and culminating with St
