NATURAL LAW AND PRACTICAL REASONING IN LATE MEDIEVAL SCHOLASTICISM Shifts Toward Early Modernity

Abstract

In this chapter, I should like to suggest that during the late thirteenth century, specifically between Aquinas and Scotus, there were some important developments in moral philosophy in which certain concepts were articulated which could be classified as more ‘modern’, and that these developments can be seen clearly in changing scholastic attitudes to the Aristotelian claim that there cannot be prudence (phronesis, also translated in this chapter as ‘practical wisdom’) without moral virtue. The first thing to be done here, of course, is to try to come to an understanding of what is ‘modern’ about modern ethics. However, the more one tries to understand what is distinctively ‘modern’, the more one becomes conscious of trying to impose a kind of artificial homogeneity upon a time period which consists of very different thinkers and ideas. The following description of modern ethics, then, is an attempt merely to identify certain prominent strands in a very complex pattern. One way to start thinking about how modern ethics should be characterised has been given to us in recent years by scholars working on virtue ethics. These scholars tend to identify the distinctiveness of modern ethics by contrasting it with ancient ethics. Modern ethics, they claim, is an