De Legibus Research Articles

400 anos do De Legibus de Francisco Suarez (1548-1617)

The paper stresses the importance of the contribution of Francisco SUAREZ (1548-1617) for the evolution of international law, with emphasis in practical issues that he had to cope with, in order to provide legal solutions – the central feature of the work is the statement of the intrinsic unity of mankind, forming a whole, albeit divided in peoples and reigns. Observes the historical continuity from the medieval legacy towards modern international law, of which the treaty De Legibus ac Deo legislatore(1612) was a relevant landmark.

Roman sumptuary legislation: Three concepts of liberty

This article argues that, next to a certain intellectual tradition of Roman liberty, often labelled ‘neo-Roman’ or ‘Republican’, we should also take into account the existence of, at least, two other conceptions of liberty, which have so far remained occluded under the prominence of Cicero’s ideas and the appropriation of them by later thinkers. By analysing the debate in opposition and in favour of sumptuary laws enacted from the 3rd century bc onwards, the article identifies a first notion of liberty which coincided with the absence of any external legal constraints upon the citizens’ private life and was, thereby, incompatible with the rule of law in this sphere. The second intellectual family of concepts equated libertas to the absence of constraints from one’s own passions as well as the possession of the capacity to pursue something worth pursuing for the well-being of the community. According to this view, liberty also resided in the supremacy of the rule of law. The third notion of libertas, elaborated by Cicero in the De re publica and De legibus, identified liberty with the absence of arbitrary domination to achieve one’s own ends and resided in the supremacy of the rule of law. Its preservation depended on the constitutional arrangements of the commonwealth and the related civic status of the individual.

A (hi)story pour les analphabètes – of Larissa Sansour's video

This article, in the form of the literary fiction of the travel diary, is an investigation into the relationships between the concept of travel, the concept of history and the image of humankind beginning with some of the so-called ‘classical’ texts of European culture – in particular: Ovid's Metamorphoses, Aristotle's Poetics, Quintilianus’ Institutio oratoria, Cicero's De legibus, Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics, Sterne's A Sentimental Journey, Heidegger's Being and Time. A concept of (a form of) humankind and a concept of history that can be drawn by these texts are related to the analysis of a frame of a video, A Space Exodus, by the Palestinian artist Larissa Sansour. The ‘reaction’ that results from this approach interacts with an ethical vision of the history(ography) that keeps in mind the experience of writing by authors such as Antonio Artaud (une écriture pour les analphabètes) and Deleuze (a foreign language inside our own language).

Roman Past and Roman Identity: Cicero's <I>De Re Publica</I>

Roman Past and Roman Identity: Cicero’s De Re Publica The turbulent period of the late Republic created an identity crisis in the Roman state as political, social, and military tensions produced increasing pressures on its republican form of government. This paper contextualizes Cicero’s De Re Publica as one effort to reestablish a cohesive identity that would unify competing factions in Rome by recalling and reenacting a Roman past that represented the order and stability that was so lacking in the late Republic. Composed in the late 50s BCE but set in 129, the dialogue imagines the renowned Roman statesman Scipio Africanus Minor discussing, along with other eminent men of his day, the role of justice in government and the characteristics of an ideal citizen in that government. Although previous scholars (e.g., Wood. 1988; Asmis. 2004) have noted that the use of the past and the philosophical dialogue format serve to disguise and distance De Re Publica from the political controversies of Cicero’s day, this paper argues that the deployment of this past and dialectic mode of discourse is deliberately intended rather to provide a model from the Greek and Roman past on which the chaotic Roman state of Cicero’s day might reshape itself and its identity. As a companion piece to De Re Publica (cf. Dyck, 7-10), Cicero wrote De Legibus, which is set, in contrast to De Re Publica, in the present, in the summer of 51, when Quintus, Cicero, and Cicero’s close friend, Atticus, engage in a discussion about the laws and practical applications for the theories of the ideal state set out in De Re Publica. Cicero employs a similar technique in two later, but similarly related works, De Natura Deorum and De Divinatione. The former presents Cicero along with three older statesmen from an earlier generation in a theoretical discussion of the nature of the gods, while the latter is set at Cicero’s villa in Tusculum and presents Cicero and Quintus in a discussion of the practical aspects and problems of divination. David Kertzer has argued persuasively that the ambiguity of political and social symbolism and representations allows each person to experience the symbol or representation differently, with no explicit articulation of those differences necessary. Thus the power of these representations lies in the fact that they emphasize political and social unity over perhaps vast differences in perception. In both De Re Publica and De Natura Deorum, Cicero is clearly indicating that the universally acclaimed statesmen of Rome’s past consider political, philosophical, and theological discussions of a theoretical nature to be worthy, necessary, and important activities that they characteristically engage in as part of the political and ethical values that they both represent and uphold (cf. Colish, 112); the similar pairing of theoretical with practical works gives the urgency of civic engagement and repair of the republic a parallel legitimacy to the theological concerns of the two later works. By appealing to a common, unarticulated, but universally shared belief in the justness of Rome’s past and its former statesmen, Cicero was trying to forge and foster a shared desire to engage in a new dialogue about the future of the Roman Republic, even as the cascade of cataclysms made Cicero’s ideal republic a still hoped for, but swiftly receding, vision. Bibliography Asmis, E. 2004. “The State as a Partnership: Cicero’s Definition of Res Publica in his Work On the State.” History of Political Thought 25: 569-99. Colish, M.L. 1999 (3rd rev. ed. from original of 1985). The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. I: Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature. Leiden. Dyke, A. 2004. A Commentary on Cicero De Legibus. Ann Arbor. Kertzer, D. 1988. Ritual, Politics, and Power. New Haven. Wood, N. 1988. Cicero’s Social and Political Thought. Berkeley.

Cicero's Philosophy of History (review)

Reviewed by: Cicero's Philosophy of History Yelena Baraz Matthew Fox . Cicero's Philosophy of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. Pp. xiii, 344. $130.00. ISBN 978-0-19-921192-0. Matthew Fox's ambitious new book is a reading of a selection of Cicero's philosophical works from different periods designed to make us reconsider the entire history of Ciceronian reception, strip away the reading habits imposed by it, and at least entertain a Cicero rather different from one with whom his readers are most familiar. Fox's approach is to offer a literary interpretation of those portions of treatises that engage most closely with ideas about Rome's past. Readers expecting to find an account of Cicero's views on such topics as historical time and causation will be disappointed. The interpretive method that Fox adopts in his reading of Cicero is an unusual and often unstable combination of deconstruction and intentionalism. He astutely locates tensions and contradictions that threaten the stability of Cicero's texts, but wants to see them all as a conscious product of Cicero's thought and literary technique, which is founded on a deep commitment to Academic Skepticism. Therefore, instead of a Cicero who strives to control reader reaction, we are presented with an anti-authoritarian Cicero who questions the meaning of Roman tradition at every turn, offers no definite solutions to his audience, and is not particularly concerned with his own image as an author. While Fox sets his reading in opposition to recent work on the treatises that centers on Cicero's careful construction of his own authority (especially John Dugan, Making a New Man: Ciceronian Self-Fashioning in the Rhetorical Works [Oxford 2005] and Brian Krostenko, Cicero, Catullus, and the Language of Social Performance [Chicago 2001]), he seems to have no quarrel with the dominant way of reading Cicero's oratory. Consequently, one side effect of his approach is an unsettling disconnect between Cicero the orator and Cicero the philosopher. This is particularly surprising since Fox in other ways builds on the work of Alain Michel, whose great accomplishment was to produce a unified image of Cicero the thinker. Fox intends the book less for Cicero specialists than for scholars working in other areas of Latin literature (14). His awareness of the difficulty of his [End Page 512] task and the novelty of his method, however, leads him to a structural choice that may make the book difficult to approach for those less familiar with the corpus: the lengthy discussion with which he begins, encompassing the first three chapters and intended in large part to counter potential objections by laying out his assumptions, makes many general claims that can be difficult to assess without reference to specific texts. The issue of accessibility is further raised by the somewhat idiosyncratic choice of works, motivated by Fox's belief in the centrality of the historical material and the dialogic form, rather than chronology or theme. The texts that receive more or less extensive treatment (De re publica, De oratore, De legibus, Brutus, De divinatione) are treated similarly: Cicero is intentionally producing open-ended texts that are meant to encourage the audience to question the validity of Roman tradition and his own authority as the author. Here, Fox's attention to choice of speakers and settings and the subtleties of the authorial voice are particularly productive. De divinatione, with its clear bipartite structure, lends itself most naturally to Fox's approach and yields the most convincing reading (ch. 8). The generalization of this type of reading to the other texts discussed is more difficult, especially as it seems to preclude significant changes in Cicero's views and approaches over time. The final chapter presents John Tolland's 1712 treatise Cicero Illustratus, which for Fox symbolizes a road abandoned of Ciceronian reception. We all make our own Ciceros. Fox presents us with a fiercely anti-authoritarian, anti-traditional Cicero. This Cicero is very intriguing, but I expect that many readers will not find him entirely recognizable. Yelena Baraz Princeton University Copyright © 2009 The Classical Association of the Atlantic States, Inc.

Chaucer's Tale of Melibee and the Failure of Allegory

When Chaucer calls his Melibee “a litel thyng in prose,” he signals a key formulation for understanding his inclusion of a translation as his contribution to the Canterbury Tales. This article argues that Chaucer draws upon the legal model of ownership and use developed in Henry de Bracton's De legibus et consuetudinibus Angliae as an analogue to literary ideas about textual ownership and borrowing. In doing so, he posits that the central problems the Melibee addresses revolve not around the specific political circumstances of Ricardian England, as has long been assumed by critics, but around the possibility of a vernacular author “owning” and “using” allegory.

Written Ballot, Secret Ballot and the iudicia publica. A note on the leges tabellariae (Cicero, De legibus 3.33––39)

Abstract Cicero, who is our main source for the leges tabellariae (De legibus 3.33–39), which were gradually introduced into all comitial voting between 139–107 BCE, claims that the written ballot, by allowing the voters to hide their choice, decreased the power of the ruling elite, but provides meager information as to their background or implications. Modern scholars have long debated about the significance of these laws. Many believe that the laws, which have supposedly introduced the secret ballot, increased the power of the people during the late Republic. Others stress the fact that the laws did not bring about any evident change in the patterns of politics or office-holding, and therefore doubt whether they have indeed strengthened the ,democratic' element in Roman politics. Viewed from this angle, it is impossible to determine unequivocally whether the laws were ‘democratic’ or ‘conservative’. This paper offers a different reading of Cicero′s text. Arguing that ‘written ballot’ is not necessarily equivalent to ‘secret ballot’, it takes its cue from the fact that Cicero, although relating to all comitial laws, speaks in fact only of judicial matters, which were, in his days, handled by the permanent law-courts. Since the law-courts seem to have been abolished in favor of the old iudicia populi in the De legibus, this paper attempts to investigate whether it is possible that Cicero was in fact attacking, by transference, the voting procedures in the law-courts, the only voting body in Rome where secrecy was strictly enforced.

CONSTRUCTING AUTHOR AND AUTHORITY: GENERIC DISCOURSE IN CICERO’S DE LEGIBUS

Atticus: Lucus quidem ille et haec Arpinatium quercus agnoscitur, saepe a me lectus in Mario. Sin manet illa quercus, haec est profecto; etenim est sane uetus.Qvintus: Manet uero, Attice noster, et semper manebit. Sata est enim ingenio; nullius autem agricolae cultu stirps tam diuturna quam poetae uersu seminari potest.Atticus: Indeed I recognize that grove and this Arpinate oak, which I’ve often read about in the Marius. If that oak still stands, it must be this one; for old it certainly is.Quintus: Of course it stands, my dear Atticus, and it will always stand, for it has been planted in the imagination. Indeed no farmer’s cultivation can produce a plant as long-lasting as that which is sown by the verse of a poet. De legibus 1.1The image of the Marian oak begins De legibus with almost postmodern abruptness. This is in part due to the absence of an authorial preface, such as the long statement of purpose partially preserved in De re publica 1.1–14, which leaves De legibus without a chronological or situational frame of reference. The result is that the treatise begins in a particularly Platonic fashion, as the contemplation of an object in the natural landscape proceeds into a discussion of its symbolic meaning, setting up the dichotomy between perception and reality, ficta and vera, the past and its memory.

CARNIVAL OF LAW: BARTOLOMEO SCALA'S DIALOGUE DE LEGIBUS ET IUDICIIS

This essay presents a new reading of Bartolomeo Scala's 1483 dialogue De legibus et iudiciis (On Laws and Legal Judgments), in which characters named for Scala and his friend Bernardo Machiavelli (Niccolò's father) have a wide-ranging debate about the nature of law. In the dialogue, Scala plays (often literally) with current philosophical, legal, and philological ideas in order to undermine the medieval legal tradition and, indeed, the very bases of human law. In this way, the dialogue presents a frightening justification for Medici rule and reveals the transformation of Scala's thought from naïve Platonism to a more mature Lucretian materialism. Appropriately set during Carnival, the dialogue ridicules and overturns the law, revealing the divine origins of law as fictions, human laws as inefficient and counterproductive, and jurists as cunning and corrupt. Like the Lucretian critique of religion, Scala's critique of law attempts to free men of its power by entirely demystifying it.

La ley moral natural según Francisco Suárez

Suárez undertakes systematic study of natural moral law in Book II of De legibus, which is integrally consecrated to the study of the eternal law, natural right and the right of nations. In confrontation, among others, with the thesis of Gabriel Vázquez, Suárez maintains the natural moral law is a divine obligatory law or command, which orders to do or to avoid that which is «fitting» or «unfitting» with the human rational nature. Divine Mind and Will contribute thus, each within the bounds of his own sphere, towards the promulgation of the natural moral law.

"None's Slave": Some Versions of Liberty in Donne's Satires 1 and 4

His skeptical, exploratory temperament inspires not only a search for freedom but also, as its inseparable correlative, an inquiry into its meaning and worth. In his elegies and lyrics, Donne explores different ways to remain “free” in love and sexual relations. In Satires 1 and 4, the focus of this essay, Donne explores different modes of asserting his freedom against a corrupt court, an oppressive legal system, and potentially enslaving social bonds. 3 Donne’s poetic representations of freedom were galvanized by his engagement with infl uential but diverging treatments of freedom in ancient poetry and moral philosophy concerning liberty as “doing what one pleases” and the value and limits of free speech. Historians of early modern conceptions of liberty have tended to focus on explicitly political and religious texts in relation to constitutional and ecclesiological controversies. 4 They have accordingly neglected the various ethical and poetic traditions out of which an early modern writer like Donne could articulate new visions of liberty. 5 While the defense of a person’s “freedom to do as he likes” (to quote John Stuart Mill) has often been associated with modern liberalism, the formulation is ancient. 6 Justinian’s Institutes defi ned libertas as the “natural faculty” of “doing what one wishes” [quod cuique facere libet] unless “prohibited by force or law,” a defi nition adopted in Henry de Bracton’s thirteenth-century treatise, De Legibus et Consuetudinibus Angliae, which remained an authoritative textbook on English law in the early modern period. 7 Yet early modern ethical discourse often followed ancient philosophers in denying that liberty was equivalent to simply doing as one pleases, which was rather an instance of immoral “license,” that is, an excess or abuse of liberty. 8 In Plato’s Republic, Socrates identifi ed doing just as one pleases as a form of license typical of democratic regimes, in which men confuse lawlessness with liberty.

Honor Dishonorable: Shameful Shame

MUCH modern sensibility feels that it is a shame that shame exists. This paradox is seemingly dissolved because the first use of shame, in an easy, common, colloquial phrase, engages a different sense of the word from the second one. In “it’s a shame that” = “it’s too bad—or to be regretted—that,” we seem to be using the word as if all the issues it raises for the papers in the current issue of this journal arose from some archaic and obsolete meaning of the word (consider also, for example, how we say “a heavenly day” to designate one delightfully of this world, and “it was literally hell” for a condition that was acutely figuratively so). It is of course the meanings of shame as the subject of the second clause that concern our speculation. But the notion that it is indeed somehow deeply shameful that shame seems to be part of the human condition is not a trivial one. Cicero declares at one point that he feels ashamed even to mention shame (pudet etiam loqui de pudicitia [De legibus I.19.50—cited by Barton, 2001: 203]). And yet this is distinct from a more personal sense of being ashamed that one may feel—despite all one believes to be the case about self and society, and so forth—that one is nonetheless feeling shame in a particular situation. The general case—of the shamefulness of shame—involves a sense of what we might call moral shamefulness . I shall return to this question later. To begin, I must observe that in these brief remarks on some aspects of the language with which we designate and invoke shame, I shall be primarily concerned with a modest agenda: to explore the possible interactions between two different concepts of shame that are both deployed in our common English word of Germanic origin, but which are often distinguished in other lanSOCIAL RESEARCH, Vol. 70, No. 4 (Winter 2003) Honor Dishonorable: Shameful Shame JOHN HOLLANDER guages. In addition, a few important literary fictions pertaining to the origins of shame will be considered. But while depending upon some of the fascinatingly detailed work by anthropologists and sociologists (and particularly a thinker like Erving Goffman, in his concern for language as well as for institutional taxonomies ), I shall invoke patterns, rather than detailed instances, of linguistic usage. And along the way, I shall glance at some analogous complexities in our use of a major candidate for shame’s somewhat oblique antithesis, honor. The first entry for “shame” in the current Oxford English Dictionary (OED) [1a] covers the two roughly distinguished branches of signification of the word defining it as The painful emotion arising from the consciousness of something dishonouring, ridiculous , or indecorous in one’s own conduct or circumstances (or in those of others whose honour or disgrace one regards as one’s own), or of being in a situation which offends one’s sense of modesty or decency. The distinction covered by the “or”—highlighted in OED [3]: a disgrace, loss of esteem or reputation—is reflected in several familiar languages. French, for example, distinguishes between pudeur and honte, roughly paralleling the Latin pudor and infamia previously noted: one can speak of rougir de pudeur, blushing with shame, but not— except with deliberately heightened rhetorical force based on a patent extension of meaning—of blushing with dishonor.1 (Consider an instance of this last usage occurs, Edmund Burke’s “As one of the people, I blush for what has followed” [Burke, 1844: III.332]. This is a figurative blush of moral shame; here, it does not mean [a] “I’m ashamed to be one of the people” but more [b] “I’m ashamed for ‘the people’ by what some of them have done, which tempts some of the people even to contemplate saying [a], which could be thought of as a shameful thing to say.)2 Here, one meaning of “shame” (pudeur) is metaphoric for another (honte). Honte can in addition designate both a sense of shame and a cause of shame, in much the same way that English shame seems so full of grammatical as well as semantic possibilities. The Indo1062...

El De legibus de Suárez y Locke

In 1679 appears in London an edition of De legibus de Suarez, just the same year when Locke begins to write his second Essay about Civil Government. The conception which both authors have about the origins of society from the agreement between all its members, with the purpose of shaping a political body, which endows itself with a ruler with «legislative power>> for directing society towards the common good, as well as the terminology which both employ, show a remarkable similarity which deserves a detailed study.

THE ROMAN CHARACTER OF FUNERALS IN THE WRITINGS OF JOSEPHUS

AbstractBecause Josephus consistently casts Jewish funerary customs in Roman hues, his contribution to our knowledge of Roman funerary practices is extensive. Three dimensions of his writings in particular evince taut alliances between Roman and Jewish funerals. The first is a précis of Jewish burial custom in Contra Apionem 2.205, in which Josephus portrays the Jewish constitution as one that eschews funerary excess—a characterization that mirrors Cicero's depiction of modest Roman burial custom in De legibus 2.59-64. The second is Josephus's transformation of the biblical portrait of David's mourning through the addition of numerous elements that are familiar principally from literary sources which depict Roman funerary custom. The third dimension is comprised of Josephus's descriptions of funerary opulence, which reach their pinnacle in Herodian funerals, whose customs and cortèges mirror the lavish obsequies of the Roman aristocracy.

Science, Religion and Politics in Restoration England. Richard Cumberland's De Legibus Naturae

The political context the natural-law debate De Legibus Naturae - I the Royal Society and Hobbism voluntarism and natural philosophy De Legibus Naturae - II De Legibus Naturae and the natural-law tradition conclusion - taming the leviathan.

Francisco Suárez e o nascimento do direito internacional

De Legibus (1612) by the Spanish thinker Francisco Suarez (1548-1617), among other important aspects, maintain the status of a founding work on modern international rights, specially those texts on Peoples´s Rights . The author was a participant of the catholic reaction against the Reformers’ doctrines and practice. His writings on law rights and justice had a worldwide influence. For Suarez, the relationships between the states are regulated by Jus Gentium , a doctrine he developed based on another Spanish political thinker, Francisco Vitoria (1492-1546). For Suarez, though arbitration be necessary, no state has the right to impose its laws on the others. Thus the rule, as an expression of the community, assumes as relevant role in law science since then. Many current international rights issues were discussed in his work.

GAWAIN'S PRACTICE OF PIETY IN "SIR GAWAIN AND THE GREEN KNIGHT"

It has become a critical commonplace that an important element in the ingenious symmetry of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is the pairing of the pentangle and the girdle, the two tokens or signs that the hero carries on his journey to the Green Chapel. In a recent study the poet's design is epitomized thus: 'Gawain leaves Camelot armed with the golden pentangle. He leaves Hautdesert armed with the green girdle'; the girdle is read as placed in opposition to the pentangle, a 'symbolic contrast' seen as 'obvious'.1 Interpretation often focuses on the contrast between Gawain's true faith as expressed in the pentangle and the superstitious trust he places in the girdle. However, the contrast may be more obvious to twentieth-century readers than it would have been to the Gawain-poet's contemporaries, for whom many details in the poem would have resonated with echoes of popular pious practices that blur what may seem to modern judgement a clear distinction between Christian faith and superstitious beliefs. I Following tradition, the poet attributes the figure of the pentangle to Solomon, and, as Richard Hamilton Green long ago observed, documentary evidence for Solomon's pentangle in the Middle-Ages concerns its use in magical practices that were systematically condemned by the Church.2 Green reads the poet's 'wholly original' appropriation of the pentangle for 'a token of inner virtue' as a master-stroke of ambiguity: 'the poet transforms a suspect magical sign into an emblem of perfection to achieve the simultaneous suggestion of greatness and potential failure' (p. 186). Recent scholarship, on the other hand, stresses the philosophical and mathematical uses of the number five and five-sided figures in scholastic Aristotelian thought, hence inferring a medieval understanding of the pentangle as a symbol of rational perfection; and on the strength of this argument, Helen Cooper excludes any association of the pentangle on Gawain's shield with magic.3 But are these opposed meanings necessarily exclusive? A shield, after all, has the double function of declaring the bearer's identity and of warding off attack; thus it would seem in principle quite appropriate for the pentangle to be seen both as the cognizance of Gawain, the perfect knight, and as a magical symbol used to ward off evil. This is not to suggest that Gawain's pentangle actually functions as magic: as Cooper points out, 'it does nothing within the poem that Gawain himself does not do in his own person' (p. 279); but if the pentangle was understood by the poet's contemporaries to be a symbol with magical associations outside the poem, it might indeed have been meant to be seen as having the potential for double meaning on Gawain's shield.4 lt is hard to recover the pentangle's accepted meaning in fourteenthcentury England, for there is very little discussion outside Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, but an examination of what evidence there is permits some conclusions to be drawn. William of Auvergne had described the design of Solomon's pentangle in great detail in his De legibus (c.1240) as he used scholastic argument to expose the irrationality of attributing supernatural power to any such device: Exempli autem causa ponemus pentagonum, quem dicunt Salomonis: necesse igitur est, vt iste pentagonus habeat hanc virtutem mirificam ex ista lineatione, qua intus habet quinque angulos obtusos, et extra quinque acutos quinque [ed. cit. acutos, quinque] triangulorum exagorum [ed. cit. exagonorum], quibus circundatur interior pentagonus. Vt autem, vel angulis, vel angulo attribuatur diuinitas, nullus patitur intellectus.5 (Now, for instance, let us cite the pentagon, which they call Solomon's: it is inevitable, then, that that pentagon possess this marvellous power by reason of that very diagram, by which it has five obtuse angles within, and outside the five acute [angles] of the five triangular enclosed spaces by which the interior pentagon is surrounded. …

The Immutability of Natural Law According to Suarez

The Thomist 62 (1998): 97-115 THE IMMUTABILITY OF NATURAL LAW ACCORDING TO SUAREZ DAVID WILLIAMS Boston College Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts IMMUTABILITY tends to be a problematic topic for the medieval tradition of natural law. There is a wide consensus that natural law is concerned with what is right and wrong per se. "It does not vary according to time, but remains unchangeable," as Aquinas has it (STh I-II, q. 94, a. 6). This principle seems to be required for such a law to have a truly natural character. If a fire in Boston and one in Madagascar are both equally fire, sharing a common nature, then natural law ought to be the same in all times and places. The difficulty is that the conditions necessary for a fire are simple and well-defined while those of human action are almost infinitely variable. The circumstances of time, place, and persons can intersect in so many ways that they seem to escape the grasp of any general theory. There are many who find this difficulty an insuperable obstacle to traditional ideas of natural law. One well-known author characterizes those ideas as "abstract, a priori, and deductive," or as seeking "to cut through the concrete circumstances to arrive at the abstract essence that is always true, and then work with these abstract and universal essences."1 Others accept the justice of this critique while suggesting that its true target is not the Thomist idea but rather a degenerate form of natural law thought derived from later scholasticism.2 This analysis would lay much of the 1 Charles E. Curran, "Natural Law in Moral Theology," in Charles E. Curran and Richard A. McCormick, S.J., eds., Natural Law and Theology (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1991), 265. 2 Here one thinks of Germain Grisez and those inspired by him such as John Finnis or William May; cf. Germain Grisez, "The First Principle of Practical Reason: A Commentary on the Summa Theologiae, 1-11, q. 94, a. 2" Natural Law Forum 10 (1965): 158-196; John Finnis, Natural Law and Natural Rights 97 98 DAVID WILLIAMS blame for the rationalist and deductive character of"conventional natural law thinking" atthe feet of Francisco Suarez (1548-1617). Indeed, that is a primary thesis of the only English-language article published on Suarez's idea of natural law in the last two decades.3 The aim of the present essay is to show that, whatever else one may say about Suarez's understanding of natural law, it cannot fairly be labeled as an abstract or a priori system that is dismissive of the particular circumstances of human actions. Arguably the greatest figure of the sixteenth-century Scholastic revival, Suarez produced two works, Disputationes Metaphysicae and De Legibus ac Deo Legislatore, that became standard texts in both Catholic and Protestant universities for generations.4 In the ten books of De Legibus, he consciously gathers and refines almost four hundred years of speculation on law into a coherent theory. It is this attempt to give a comprehensive and detailed view of law as a whole that sets him apart from many other authors in the natural law tradition, including Aquinas, who treat of the subject by the way or in small portions of larger works. Suarez's contribution is particularly significant in the present discussion (which makes the misunderstanding of his thought more striking), for while maintaining the constant character of natural law, he lays out a specific and detailed way of approaching concrete situations. The question of immutability and change occupies more than a third of Suarez's treatment of natural law in De Legibus 11.5 He (Oxford: Clarendon, 1980); and William May, "The Meaning and Nature of the Natural Law in Thomas Aquinas," American Journal oflurisprudence 22 (1977): 168-89. 3 William May, "The Natural Law Doctrine of Francis Suarez," New Scho/astici$m 58 (1984): 409-28. There are also a number of references to Suarez in Finnis's Natural Law and Natural Rights. The influence of the dismissive attitude toward Suarez's natural-law theory engendered by this line of thought may be shown in the fact that the issue of American...

J. G. F. Powell (ed.), Cicero the Philosopher: Twelve Papers. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995. Pp. xvii + 360. ISBN 0-19-814751-1. £40.00.

Introduction: Cicero's Philosophical works and their Background 1. Cicero's Plato and Aristotle 2. Cicero's Definition of res publica 3. Silencing the Troublemaker: De Legibus 1.39 and the continuity of Cicero's scepticism 4. Probabile, veri simile, and related Terms 5. Cicero on Epicurean Pleasures 6. Cicero on self-love and love of humanity in De Finibus 3 7. Form and Content in the Tusculan Disputations 8. Cicero and the Therapists 9. Causes and Necessary Conditions in the Topica and De fato 10. Cicero's translations from Greek 11. '...a self-indulgent misuse of leisure and writing?' How not to write philosophy: did Cicero get it right? 12. Philosophical Badinage in Cicero's letters to his friends

Nowożytne próby rekonstrukcji ustawy XII Tablic

Legal humanism brought special interests in the Roman law sources that are earlier than the Justinian’s codification. It was focused on the Twelve Tables statute - the oldest legal source. Aymarus Rivallius and Alexander ab Alexandro combined its elements, but did not make an effort to reconstruct the composition. Johann Oldendorp only formally related to the statute. In the matter of fact, the order of his reconstruction was based on the Cicero’s classification of branches of law into ius sacrum, ius publicum and ius privatum, that was presented in his De legibus. Earlier, the very same scheme was used in the reconstruction of Hotomanus and in that of Corpus Iuris Civilis, Lugduni 1600. The latter reconstruction made the Twelve Tables better known to the broad public and enhanced reaserches on the oldest legal source of Roman law.