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of ideas, of course, for Socrates asks hard questions about inclinations and custom, as does Sophocles, Aeschylus, Aristotle, the Stoics, and others; so, too, do the queries about the right way to live prompt further questions about the nature of “nature,” the genesis of order, political and moral systems best in keeping with that order, the distinction between appearance and reality, and so on. Despite the developments, common sense natural law 1—nature as inclination—is alive and well, for instance, in both sides of the debates about same-sex marriage. Common sense natural law 2—nature as proverb—appears whenever insights cluster and are shared within concrete communities of shared value and meaning, with the various common senses of different groups each appearing natural and normative to its membership. Common sense natural law 3—nature as nature—continues in both its mythic and philosophic forms whenever natural law is thought to reside in the world of nature, either as a function of the divine or as material order itself (ordo naturae), or as innately known.

      Since the various common sense natural laws continue, so too the tensions and questions regarding their meaning and adequacy. It’s not as though Antigone settled once and for all the difference between what it means to be a good citizen and what it means to be a good human, and Socrates certainly put no end to the sophists among us, or to the force of custom and habit. Consequently, while we can trace how the tensions and questions within the historical past prompted developments within natural law as it moved from common sense to the theoretical mode of meaning, those very tensions and questions can be discerned in contemporary scholarship and debate. Understanding the role of differentiation in how meaning is made requires a move from common sense to theory to explain how there are yet more “natures” to identify and grasp, yet more accounts of natural law to investigate. We turn, thus, to the second mode of meaning, the theoretical.

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