Reason in Action

Reason in Action PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199580057
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 378

Book Description
Reason in Action collects John Finnis's work on practical reason and moral philosophy. Ranging from foundational issues of meta-ethics to modern ethical debates, the essays trace the emergence and development of his new classical theory of natural law through close engagement with a broad range of contemporary thinkers and problems.

The Collected Essays of John Finnis: Reason in action

The Collected Essays of John Finnis: Reason in action PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780199580040
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description


Collected Essays: Reason in action

Collected Essays: Reason in action PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages :

Book Description
"The collected essays of John Finnis brings together 106 papers, including nearly two dozen previously unpublished works. Thematically arranged, the five volumes provide ready access to his contributions across central areas of modern practical philosophy, the philosophy of practical reason; the philosophy of personal identity and intention; political philosophy; the philosophy of law; and the philosophy of revelation and the role of religion in public life. Fully cross-referenced, cross-indexed, and introduced by the author, the collected essays reveal the connections and coherence of the different branches of Finnis's work, showing the full picture of his philosophical contribution for the first time. Covering topics from self-refutation and discourse ethics to evolution and religion, and the adoption of Bills of Rights, the work in these volumes offer a unique insight into the intellectual currents and political debates that have transformed major areas of public morality and law over the last half century" --p.4, book jacket.

Collected Essays

Collected Essays PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199580040
Category : Common good
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
"The collected essays of John Finnis brings together 106 papers, including nearly two dozen previously unpublished works. Thematically arranged, the five volumes provide ready access to his contributions across central areas of modern practical philosophy, the philosophy of practical reason; the philosophy of personal identity and intention; political philosophy; the philosophy of law; and the philosophy of revelation and the role of religion in public life. Fully cross-referenced, cross-indexed, and introduced by the author, the collected essays reveal the connections and coherence of the different branches of Finnis's work, showing the full picture of his philosophical contribution for the first time. Covering topics from self-refutation and discourse ethics to evolution and religion, and the adoption of Bills of Rights, the work in these volumes offer a unique insight into the intellectual currents and political debates that have transformed major areas of public morality and law over the last half century"--Page 4, book jacket.

Philosophy of Law

Philosophy of Law PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191616206
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Book Description
John Finnis has been a central figure in the fundamental re-shaping of legal philosophy over the past half-century. This volume of his Collected Essays shows the full range and power of his contributions to the philosophy of law. The volume collects nearly thirty papers: on the foundations of law's authority; major theories and theorists of law; legal reasoning; revolutions, rights and law; and the logic of law-making. The essays collected include Finnis' recent appreciations and root-and-branch critiques of Hart's legal and political theories, his engagements with other central figures and works in the field, including Dworkin's Law's Empire; Raz on authority and coordination; Coleman, Leiter and Gardner on legal positivism and naturalism; Aquinas as founder of legal positivism; Weber on the fact-value distinction and legitimation; Unger on indeterminacy in law; Posner on intention and economics; Kelsen and courts on revolutions; game-theory and rational-choice theory; with misinterpreters of Hohfeld on rights logic; John Paul II on voting for unjust laws; analogy's role in legal reasoning; the distribution of constitutional authority in the Empire and its dissolution; the judicial opportunism of separation of powers doctrine in the Australian constitution; the architecture of Blackstone's Commentaries; restitution in civil wrongs; and many other aspects of law and legal theory. Several papers bring to bear his extensive work as a constitutional adviser and lawyer on persistent problems of constitutional theory. Previously unpublished papers include two on critical or post-modern legal theory, and an introduction reflecting on legal philosophy's development and future.

Human Rights and Common Good

Human Rights and Common Good PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191616192
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 448

Book Description
This central volume in the Collected Essays brings together John Finnis's wide-ranging contribution to central issues in political philosophy. The volume begins by examining the general theory of political community and social justice. It includes the powerful and well-known Maccabaean Lecture on Bills of Rights — a searching critique of Ronald Dworkin's moral-political arguments and conclusions, of the European Court of Human Rights' approach to fundamental rights, and of judicial review as a constitutional institution. It is followed by an equally searching analysis of Kant's thought on the intersection of law, right, and ethics. Other papers in the book's opening section include an early assessment of Rawls's A Theory of Justice, a radical re-interpretation of Aquinas on limited government and the significance of the private/public distinction, and a challenging paper on virtue and the constitution. The volume then focuses on central problems in modern political communities, including the achievement of justice in work and distribution; the practice of punishment; war and justice; the public control of euthanasia and abortion; and the nature of marriage and the common good. There are careful and vigorous critiques of Nietzsche on morality, Hart on punishment, Dworkin on the enforcement of morality and on euthanasia, Rawls on justice and law, Thomson on the woman's right to choose, Habermas on abortion, Nussbaum and Koppelman on same-sex relations, and Dummett and Weithman on open borders. The volume's previously unpublished papers include a foundational consideration of labour unions, a fresh statement of a new grounding for the morality of sex, a surprising reading of C.S. Lewis's Abolition of Man on contraception, and an introduction reviewing some of the remarkable changes in private and public morality over the past half-century.

Religion and Public Reasons

Religion and Public Reasons PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019958009X
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 434

Book Description
Religion and Public Reasons collects the theological work of John Finnis, spanning his contribution to such foundational issues as the justification for belief in revelation and moral-theological methodology; to the role of religion in public reason and law; and to major controversies within Catholic thought and practice since the 1960s.

Reason, Morality, and Law

Reason, Morality, and Law PDF Author: John Keown
Publisher:
ISBN: 0199675503
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 628

Book Description
John Finnis is a pre-eminent legal, moral and political philosopher. This volume contains over 25 essays by leading international scholars of philosophy and law who critically engage with issues at the heart of Finnis's work.

Fundamentals of Ethics

Fundamentals of Ethics PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
ISBN: 9780878404087
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 182

Book Description
Are we entitled to be confident that our moral judgements can be objective? Can they express insights into aspects of reality, rather than mere feelings, tastes, desires, decisions, upbringing, or conventions? Why must we consider some of our choices to be free, and how do our free choices matter? How far should our moral judgements be based on assessments of expected consequences? Can utilitarianism, and other consequentialist or proportionalist theories, be anything more than the rationalization of positions taken on other grounds? The main theme of this book is the challenge to ethics from philosophical scepticism and from contemporary forms of consequentialism. But in seeking to meet this challenge, the book develops a sustained philosophical argument about many of the central questions of ethics. It reviews classical positions, and challenges some long-influential interpretations of those positions. It also reviews and participates in some recent developments and controversies in Anglo-American ethical theory. The activity of ethical theorizing itself is shown to be a matter of free and intelligent decision, in pursuit of intelligible good; it thus provides a test-case for any ethical theory.

Religion and Public Reasons

Religion and Public Reasons PDF Author: John Finnis
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191616214
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 440

Book Description
The essays in Religion and Public Reasons seek to argue for, and illustrate, a central element of John Finnis's theory of natural law: that the main tenets of personal and political morality, and of a good legal order, are taught both by reason (arguments accessible to everyone) and by authentic divine revelation (teachings accessible to all who have a reasonable faith in its witnesses). The author's main books each include arguments for rejecting atheism and agnosticism; several papers here take up these arguments and indicate ways in which they open onto the reasonable grounds for accepting that more about God's nature, and about the meaning of Creation (including ongoing natural evolution), is disclosed by the revelation carried far forward among the Jewish people, and given definitive form by the Jews and Greeks who assembled in the universal Church, as witnesses of Christ, to carry forward that revelation into our present. Several papers argue that "public reason" properly includes such a religion, and that Humeian, Nietzschean, Deweyian, Rawlsian or other atheistical or deistic understandings of a reasonable secularism are badly mistaken. Many substantial papers record the author's position in controversies within Catholicism since the 1960s: on social justice, contraception and abortion; nuclear deterrence; Newman on conscience before pope; Maritain's hopes for a new Christendom and von Balthasar's for a hell empty of human persons; and on "proportionalism" and Lonerganian "historical consciousness" as moral-theological methods. Previously unpublished papers include several University and college sermons, and a substantial introduction.