What do natural lawyers chase instead of ambulances?

Last updated on: August 25, 2012 at 12:45 pm by Leah Libresco

What do natural lawyers chase instead of ambulances? 2012-08-25T12:45:37-04:00 Leah Libresco

LOGO Patheos Explore the world's faith through different perspectives on religion and spirituality! Patheos has the views of the prevalent religions and spiritualities of the world.

Look what I found by googling “Newton vs Leibniz”!
(totally becomes relevant farther down the post)

Buried in the (correct) thread for discussing meta-questions about that gargantuan thread on natural law, Joshua Zelinsky of Religion, Sets, and Politics raised a meta-question about whether he should find natural law plausible enough to raise to the level where he cares about investigating the hypothesis. He wrote:

The following is not a critique of natural law but rather a meta-level heuristic concern about it. It seems pretty clear that once one buys into a general Catholic (or a high church Anglican) sort of approach that natural law makes sense. However, other religions with extremely similar baselines have adopted similar premises but don’t have “natural law” systems. This isn’t strictly speaking true- for example in Judaism the Maimonidean tradition does have some similar ideas, and in certain aspects of Islamic philosophy one gets not too dissimilar ideas. But, if the idea really does rest on very basic notions of teleology that are common enough that they are shared by all the major Abrahamic religions, one has to wonder why similar arguments have evolved among them. Why for example does the Ba’hai philosophy have no similar notion? (Note that while the term “natural law” is used also in the Enlightenment philosophers to talk about rights they are a) heavily influenced by their European upbringing and b) generally using the term in a very different manner other than essential agreement that some form of natural law exists).

This ties in with a general heuristic that seems worthwhile. Does a given idea arise independently in multiple cultures? For example, Aristotelian logic looks a lot like Indian logic (although Indian logic arose much later so there is an argument that the Indians may have been influenced by Western logic). Thus, this suggests that Aristotle’s basic ideas about logic are potentially culturally independent. Obviously, such arguments have their limits- multiple cultures came up with a geocentric model of the solar system but hat’s because the naive evidence really does look that way. Moreover, as humanity has advanced, communication between cultures is easier. In an effectively global culture, it is much harder for ideas to arise separately. But despite this, it should be a slight alarm bell that natural law, which by its nature claims to arise at a near universal level in fact only comes out of a single set of theological traditions.

We’re not using the strict rules of the last thread, because I think this points to a more general epistemological question: how suspicious should you be of a culturally-isolated idea? Both Leibniz and Newton discovered the calculus, because “what’s true is what’s there to be interacted with.” If we’d shot either of them, the math would have still turned up.

So, was Aristotle or Aquinas indispensable? Should truths that require singular insight be taken with a much bigger grain of salt? I’m still mulling this over, and I’m pretty sure I’m going to be returning to it next week at length when I review Gregory Wolfe’s Beauty Will Save the World, so I’d like to hear your thoughts now.

On the factual matter: Does natural law crop up in other traditions?

On the epistemological: What do you make of your answer to the above?

MEANWHILE: Yvain, the one who launched that giant thread, has a bunch of follow-up questions chez lui. He’s been reading The Last Superstition, so now he’s asking things like:

Exactly how many forms do things have? I have the form “human”, but do I also have the forms “male”, “white person”, “doctor”, “person sitting in a motel in Alabama”, “person whose first name contains a prime number of letters”, and “thing made of mass”? If not, what’s the distinction? If so, how does one figure out which forms are more important than others?

On the very remote chance that there’s anyone here who is familiar both with Aristotelian forms and with the idea of cluster-structures in thingspace, does the latter totally remove the need for the former, do they address different questions, or what?

Hie thee hence if you think you can be of help!

Apologetics

Epistemology/Philosophy

natural law

Previous Post

August 24, 2012

Aaaahhh! Aaaaahhhhh! AAAAAaaaaahhhhhhHHHH!

Next Post

August 26, 2012 Weakness as Strength

Browse Our Archives

Select a Category 7 Quick Takes Apologetics Atheism Book Conversion Debate Tactics Debates Epistemology/Philosophy Housekeeping Ideological Turing Test Marriage Morality in Practice Parsing Catholicism Possibly Heretical Radio Reviews/Recommendations Sequence Index Spiritual Practice Uncategorized

Select a Month April 2017 March 2017 January 2017 December 2016 September 2016 August 2016 July 2016 June 2016 May 2016 April 2016 March 2016 February 2016 January 2016 December 2015 November 2015 October 2015 September 2015 August 2015 July 2015 June 2015 May 2015 April 2015 March 2015 February 2015 January 2015 December 2014 November 2014 October 2014 September 2014 August 2014 July 2014 June 2014 May 2014 April 2014 March 2014 February 2014 January 2014 December 2013 November 2013 October 2013 September 2013 August 2013 July 2013 June 2013 May 2013 April 2013 March 2013 February 2013 January 2013 December 2012 November 2012 October 2012 September 2012 August 2012 July 2012 June 2012 May 2012 April 2012 March 2012 February 2012 January 2012 December 2011 November 2011 October 2011 September 2011 August 2011 July 2011 June 2011 May 2011 April 2011 March 2011 February 2011 January 2011 December 2010 November 2010 October 2010 September 2010 August 2010 July 2010 June 2010

TAKE THE

Religious Wisdom Quiz

Who predicted the birth of John the Baptist?

Select your answer to see how you score.

Raphael Uriel Gabriel Michael