Online Seminar Series

Is Natural Law Real?

Saturday, October 22, 2022

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The term natural law is a little hazy. Is natural law simply a more authoritative version of positive law? And if that is true, how might we understand how the founders of the American republic came to believe in the proposition that we are all endowed with certain inalienable rights which are self-evident truths? Conversely, does science and civil law show us that there are no natural laws, rather only values?

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If natural law is real is it grounded in the metaphysical or in something else? How do we reconcile the problems of the is and ought, skepticism, positivism, notions of right and wrong, teleology, scientism, the connection between virtue and happiness, and human dignity.

We invite you to join us as we attempt to clarify what natural law means. We will read and discuss works by Sophocles, Heraclitus, Protagoras, Thrasymachus (in Plato), Aristotle, Cicero, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Hobbes, Locke, the American founders, C.S. Lewis, Martin Luther King Jr, as well as the The U.N. Declaration of Human Rights, among other works.

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October 22 Reading:

Selections from Augustine’s City of God – Penguin Classics;
Revised ed. edition (January 2004) – ISBN – 978-0140448948

Bk II  Ch 21-2      pg  72-7

Bk XIV Ch 28.     pg  593-4

Bk XIX Ch 12-7   pg 866-79

Bk XIX Ch 20-1.  pg 881-4

Bk XIX Ch 24-8   pg 890-5

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Schedule:

12:00-2:00PM PST

Tutor:

Carl Bobkoski

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Location:

Online. Register to receive the link.