Aristotle
Aristotle (384–322 BC) enters this wiki through the Nicomachean Ethics and the Politics, the works at the root of the natural-law tradition.
Place in This Wiki
Aristotle is the foundational figure of the lineage, though not a member of it in spirit: he has a theory of natural justice and natural teleology, not of natural rights. The Ethics distinguishes natural justice (“that which has everywhere the same force”) from the merely conventional; the Politics treats man as “naturally a political animal” and the polis as a natural community. Medieval and modern natural-law thinkers — above all Aquinas, for whom he is simply “the Philosopher” — build on this.
The wiki flags the limits honestly: Aristotle reaches statist conclusions (the polis as the sovereign community, to which the individual is ordered) and defends natural slavery, which the rights tradition repudiates. He is used here for the method and the natural/conventional distinction, not as an ally.
See Also
- Nicomachean Ethics - natural vs. conventional justice
- Politics - the natural teleology of the polis
- Thomas Aquinas - Short author reference for Thomas Aquinas (c. 1225–1274), the Dominican theologian whose Treatise on Law in the Summa Theologica is the most systematic medieval statement of natural law
- Galt’s Speech - The ~60-page radio address near the end of Atlas Shrugged — the complete, systematic statement of Rand’s Objectivism and the novel’s philosophical climax.
- Natural Law - The wiki’s natural-law hub: the classical lineage of reason-knowable justice above positive law, from Aristotle and Cicero through Aquinas, Grotius, Locke
- Ethics vs Morality
Sources
- Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Full Text) - Book V on justice
- Aristotle, Politics (Full Text) - Book I on the natural polis