Questions of the effect of the law in the views of the philosophers of ancient Greece and ancient Rome

Abstract

In the work, the author analyzed the ideas of the philosophers of Ancient Greece and Ancient Rome, in which the first ideas about law, its operation and effectiveness were formed. It was noted that the historical doctrinal analysis of law is an important method of studying law, which allows studying legal institutions and processes, on the one hand - in the sequence in which they arose, developed and changed each other, and, on the other hand - how they were perceived and understood what place they occupied in the history of legal thought.The current state of scientific understanding of the specified category is a consequence of the long-term formation of a multifaceted worldview perception of the specified phenomenon, which developed historically. Therefore, the answer to the question: how and when the category «action of law» arises, as it was perceived by thinkers and philosophers of the past, is mandatory for research in legal science, since, using the historical-legal method of scientific knowledge in combination with the method of logical analysis, we have the opportunity to follow important changes in the legal doctrine, its certain improvement, to analyze for ourselves the existing legal ideas about the operation of the law and to use them in the practical plane. Based on the analysis of the views of philosophers (Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Seneca, Cicero, etc.), the conclusions were drawn that: 1) in the ideas of the thinkers of Ancient Greece and Rome, the effect of law has not yet received its categorical distinction, while at the same time, they present the characteristics of law , which are provided from the point of view of the process and consequences of its spread to the territory of the respective state and to the population living there; 2) the teachings of antiquity about the state and the law were based on idealistic concepts of eternal justice, and the issue of its achievement and provision through the proper operation of the law had a secondary character; 3) significant attention in the views of thinkers was paid to natural law, and the question of the effectiveness of law mainly concerned positive (written) law, as such, which ensures the inviolability of the laws of nature by society and individuals; 4) legal ideas of thinkers laid not only the worldview basis for understanding the operation of law, but also influenced the further development of: a) worldview perception of law as an activity-oriented phenomenon; b) scientific knowledge of law as a functional phenomenon endowed with a set of regularities.