On Law, Morality, and Politics Paperback – Import, 4 November 2003

A VERY STRAIGHT FORWARD BOOK EASY TO UNDERSTAND MOST OF THE TIME. TAKE YOUR TIME READING THIS.

v.good

If you like to understand the historical reasons for many of today's laws, this book is a great resource. Theologically, this book also helped me to understand the concept of Devine law. Acquinas explains that Devine law is God's plan for humanity, which is for our benefit. Further, Acquinas shows that the goodness of human laws must be measured by their consistency with the Greatest Commandments--loving our neighbors as ourselves and loving God with all our hearts, souls, and minds. Some "laws," however, are so inconsistent with these commands that they are not laws at all; they are "violence."

There are some authors that are read because of their foundational wisdom, perennial insights into human nature, or their enduring aesthetic sense. In this category, I include philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau, sociologists including Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Machiavelli, de Tocqueville, Nietzsche and Marx, and writers of fiction including Cervantes, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, Gogol, Charlotte Bronte, Turgenev, Melville, Chekhov, Flaubert, Tolstoy, Viginia Woolf, Kafka and James Joyce. There are also writers who are read because of their historical importance which often delineates a specific change in the course of human history but nevertheless seem to lack the wisdom, sociological insights or aesthetic sensibility categorized by the first group of writers. In this category I include writers such as Lucretius' "On the Nature of Things", Cicero's essays, Augustine's "Confessions", Maimonides' "Guide of the Perplexed", Pascal's "Pensees", Edmond Burke's "Reflections on the Revolution in France", Benjamin Franklin's Autobiography, Orwell, Camus and Aquinas. The first group of writers are timeless, the second group are historical.Just as Maimonides' "Guide for the Perplexed" is an attempt to reconcile a literal interpretation of the Torah with Aristotelian objectivity so too are the excerpts from Aquinas' Summa Theologica combined in this volume as "On Law, Morality and Politics" an attempt to reconcile medieval Christian thought with Aristotle's "Politics" and "Nicomachean Ethics."The cornerstone of Aquinas' political philosophy is derived from Aristotle's concept that humans are political and social beings and that only within the framework of the polis, or civil society, can people attain the fullness of life, and in the words of Aristotle those that do not need civil society must be either like "beasts or gods." Accordingly, if the city is natural, political authority is also natural, then the central question of political philosophy is to determine the best regime. For Acquinas, the best regimes must blend the demands of wisdom and excellence with the need for consent and therefore combine the best features of a monarchy, aristocracy and polity and he highlights as an example the biblical case of the rule of Moses balanced by a group of Elders chosen from the people at large.Aquinas' historical relevance is then to take Aristotle's political philosophy and to modify it with Christian dogma. For Aquinas there is not fundamental disagreement between the truth of revelation and the knowledge obtained by reason and experience, and therefore a discrepancy between biblical teachings and philosophy can only be due to imperfections of the human mind. In the excerpts in this volume, Aquinas goes to great lengths and various intellectual contortions to prove that there is no tension between the four kinds of law: eternal, natural, human and divine. In Aquinas' thinking, civil society ceases to be uniquely responsible for the totality of moral virtue and is itself judged by a higher standard. A human's moral life ceases to be understood solely in terms of Aristotle's concepts of completeness and fulfillment, and rather becomes a matter of compliance with divine unconditional law.In terms of historical importance, Aquinas' synthesis of Aristotelian philosophy and biblical law stands midway between the reason of natural right philosophers and the faith of the religious tradition. Aristotle is focused on man's happiness in this life whereas Aquinas is focused on human happiness in the theoretical life to come.

I used this book for college and wrote a paper about it, The book was in very good condition overall.