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 facade 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.
...MoreReview Javier Galvez Aguirre (2023) Review of "Giambattista Vico on natural law : religion, rhetoric, and sensus communis". Renaissance Quarterly (pp. 1182-1183).
Similar Citations
Thesis
Timothy D. Harfield;
(2015)
The Occasions of Community: Giambattista Vico and the Concept of Society
(/isis/citation/CBB262339207/)
Article
James Hutton;
(2021)
Kant, Causation and Laws of Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB989976169/)
Article
Stan, Marius;
(2013)
Kant's Third Law of Mechanics: The Long Shadow of Leibniz
(/isis/citation/CBB001320270/)
Book
Janiak, Andrew;
Schliesser, Erick;
(2012)
Interpreting Newton: Critical Essays
(/isis/citation/CBB001500334/)
Article
Michael Bennett McNulty;
(2015)
Rehabilitating the Regulative Use of Reason: Kant on Empirical and Chemical Laws
(/isis/citation/CBB187849312/)
Article
DiSalle, Robert;
(2013)
The Transcendental Method from Newton to Kant
(/isis/citation/CBB001320267/)
Article
Caleb Hazelwood;
(2023)
Newton's “law-first” epistemology and “matter-first” metaphysics
(/isis/citation/CBB484510805/)
Article
Víctor Alonso-Rocafort;
(2024)
Vico and the conspiracy of the sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB646340208/)
Article
Daniel Canaris;
(2019)
China in Giambattista Vico and Jesuit Accommodationism
(/isis/citation/CBB119214908/)
Article
Jansson, Lina;
(2013)
Newton's “satis est”: A New Explanatory Role for Laws
(/isis/citation/CBB001213357/)
Article
Charland, Louis C.;
(2002)
The Natural Kind Status of Emotion
(/isis/citation/CBB000410710/)
Book
Brown, James Robert;
(1991)
The Laboratory of the Mind: Thought Experiments in the Natural Sciences
(/isis/citation/CBB001500158/)
Chapter
Brading, Katherine;
(2012)
Newton's Law-Constitutive Approach to Bodies: A Response to Descartes
(/isis/citation/CBB001500338/)
Article
D'Abramo, Germano;
(2012)
The Peculiar Status of the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the Quest for Its Violation
(/isis/citation/CBB001211050/)
Book
Stephen Mumford;
Matthew Tugby;
(2013)
Metaphysics and Science
(/isis/citation/CBB707613342/)
Article
Lehoux, Daryn;
(2006)
Laws of Nature and Natural Laws
(/isis/citation/CBB000740016/)
Book
Creager, Angela N. H.;
Lunbeck, Elizabeth;
Wise, M. Norton;
(2007)
Science without Laws: Model Systems, Cases, Exemplary Narratives
(/isis/citation/CBB000774295/)
Book
Dorato, Mauro;
(2005)
The Software of the Universe: An Introduction to the History and Philosophy of Laws of Nature
(/isis/citation/CBB000771896/)
Article
Steigerwald, Joan;
(2010)
Natural Purposes and the Reflecting Power of Judgment: The Problem of the Organism in Kant’s Critical Philosophy
(/isis/citation/CBB001000084/)
Article
Hodge, M. J. S.;
(2014)
On Darwin's Science and Its Contexts
(/isis/citation/CBB001500024/)
Be the first to comment!