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 “by nature 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 highest good) 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

Sources

• Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics (Full Text) - Book V on justice
• Aristotle, Politics (Full Text) - Book I on the natural polis