These reading guides are designed mainly to indicate the passages and topics in the reading that will be the focus of class discussion. In some cases, I will also provide background information and other introductory material.
Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225-1274) was a medieval philosopher and theologian who was strongly influenced by Aristotle (who he refers to as “the Philosopher”). The Summa Theologiae is a very large work spanning a wide range of topics. We will be reading a few selections from the “first part of the second part” (often abbreviated “I-II”).
The work is organized into groups of topics, called “questions,” each of whose subordinate “articles” follows the pattern of a medieval academic debate. An article begins with an actual question framing an issue. A series of “objections” to a position on the issue are opposed by the contrary view, and the issue is resolved when Aquinas provides his “answer,” which then serves as the basis for replies to the objections. The answers are the key source for Aquinas’ views, but the replies to objections sometimes provide important further elaborations. The selections I’ve assigned include three full articles and the answers from a number of others, with objections and replies included when they include interesting further material.
• Our discussion will focus on Aquinas’ ideas of natural and human (or positive) law and the relation between them. These are the subjects of question 91, articles 2 and 3 (pp. 4-7), and question 95, article 2 (pp. 11-12), and those are the articles that are included in full. The other selections supplement them in a variety of ways.
• Question 90 and articles 1 and 4 of question 91 set out the context in which Aquinas considers human and natural law.
• Q. 90 presents Aquinas’ concept of law in the broadest sense. His definition appears at the end of his answer in article 4, where it serves as a summary of his answers to this and the preceding three questions.
• Articles 1 and 4 of question 91 provide Aquinas’ descriptions of two further varieties of law, eternal and divine law, and he will refer to these ideas occasionally when discussing human and natural law.
• Aquinas’ account of the relation between human and natural law is filled out in a variety of ways by most of the remaining selections. Several of them concern aspects or consequences that relation.
• Q. 94, aa. 4-5. The main problem Aquinas works to solve in q. 95, a. 2, is how to reconcile the variability of human law with the constancy implied by the term “natural.” But how much room for variation is there already in natural law itself?
• Q. 96, aa. 4-6. How much of the character of natural law carries over to human law?
• Two further issues concern the relation between human law in the central case of legislation by some state and two other sorts of law.
• Q. 95, a. 4. How is the “law of nations,” as the Roman jurists understood it, related to human and natural law?
• Q. 97, a. 3. Can human law derive only from explicit legislation or is custom a possible source?
We will return to the first of these when we look at international law at the end of the course, and the second will reappear in a variety of contexts in the first half of the course.