St. Augustine's Press
The wide revival of practical philosophy and objective-values ethics of the past decades has involved a strong rediscovery of classical natural law. This rediscovery is marked by two main traits: the emphasis on the autonomy of practical reason (as a reaction to the modern voluntarism centered on the external will of the legislator) and the emphasis on the originality of practical reason (as a reaction to the idea of a rational deduction of moral truths from the facts of nature). Without denying an autonomous character of ethics and the need for a strong criticism to moral rationalism, Di Blasi claims that Aquinas’s thought remains unintelligible if we remove from it either God or the metaphysical understanding of nature.
"[God and the Natural Law is] direct and immediate, because [today] it seems ever more difficult for our mindset to think through to the depths, without historical and conceptual filters, the simple and radical idea that natural law is nothing other than the encounter between man and God. Natural law is the way in which we discover ourselves as part of the project of creation." – Salvatore Amato, Rivista Internazionale di Filosofia del Diritto
A Rereading of Thomas Aquinas
Translated by David Thunder
Foreword by Ralph McInerny
Preface by Mario A. Cattaneo
270 pages, foreword, preface, introduction,
notes, bibliography, index 6" x 9"
Cloth ISBN: 1-58731-351-0
$37.50