Does Nature Make Laws? An Introduction to the Natural Law Tradition | Prof. Joshua Hochschild (duplicate?)

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4.8 • 729 Ratings

🗓️ 28 January 2021

⏱️ 48 minutes

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Summary

This lecture was delivered at University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign on November 02, 2020.

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About the speaker:

Joshua Hochschild is the Monsignor Robert R. Kline Professor of Philosophy at Mount St. Mary’s University, where he also served six years as the inaugural Dean of the College of Liberal Arts. His primary research is in medieval logic, metaphysics, and ethics, with broad interest in liberal education and the continuing relevance of the Catholic intellectual tradition. He is the author of The Semantics of Analogy: Rereading Cajetan’s De Nominum Analogia (2010), translator of Claude Panaccio’s Mental Language: From Plato to William of Ockham (2017), and co-author of A Mind at Peace: Reclaiming an Ordered Soul in the Age of Distraction (2017). His writing has appeared in First Things, Commonweal, Modern Age and the Wall Street Journal. For 2020-21 he’s been elected to serve as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association.

Transcript

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0:00.0	This talk is brought to you by the Tamistic Institute.
0:03.3	For more talks like this, visit us at tamisticinstitute.org.
0:10.9	Does nature make laws?
0:14.9	I've been invited to deliver an introductory lecture with that title on the natural law tradition.
0:23.6	Having accepted that invitation, I feel bound to honor it, and in one way my acceptance was an act of self-binding,
0:32.6	effectively like making a promise. I took on an obligation. But there seems to be a source of obligation outside of
0:40.8	myself. I promised something, so I owe it, and not just to myself, but to others. But why must a
0:48.6	promise be kept? Why can I find myself even by my own action in a state of obligation to others, to you, my audience?
0:58.0	To talk about the natural law tradition is not only to offer a particular perspective on how to answer this question,
1:07.0	but also to elucidate what the question itself reveals about the human condition.
1:13.4	Before I proceed, allow me to make some distinctions.
1:17.6	As a topic for a lecture, natural law admits of different modes of approach and scopes of focus.
1:25.1	We could speak of the general obligation of natural law as a whole or of specific
1:31.0	obligations of the natural law, such as keeping one's promises. We can also speak of those
1:36.9	obligations, general or specific, precisely conceived as obligations of natural law.
1:44.8	And we can consider how conceiving of obligation as natural law relates obligation to other
1:50.7	parts of moral philosophy and theology.
1:54.2	And further, we could speak of how different historical thinkers have developed theories
1:59.4	of natural law with respect to any of the previous
2:02.4	topics already distinguished and of how the idea of natural law and particular theories of natural
2:08.2	law have been defended against various forms of criticism. And in fact, one can find extensive
2:15.7	scholarship in each of these areas.
	...

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