Centre activities
New Publications
CONCEPT are delighted to announce the publication of a major new work on Aristotle and Natural Law by centre member Dr Tony Burns.
Tony Burns, Aristotle and Natural Law (Continuum Books, 2011).
Aristotle and Natural Law lays out a new theoretical approach which distinguishes between the notions of ‘interpretation,’ ‘appropriation,’ ‘negotiation’ and ‘reconstruction’ of the meaning of texts and their component concepts. These categories are then deployed in an examination of the role which the concept of natural law is used by Aristotle in a number of key texts. The book argues that Aristotle appropriated the concept of natural law, first formulated by the defenders of naturalism in the ‘nature versus convention debate’ in classical Athens. Thereby he contributed to the emergence and historical evolution of the meaning of one of the most important concept in the lexicon of Western political thought.
Aristotle and Natural Law offers an important new examination of Aristotle’s political thought and its relationship to the natural law tradition. The book challenges recent alternative interpretations of Aristotle and argues that Aristotle’s ethics is most usefully seen as a particular type of natural law theory. Tony Burns shows that the type of natural law theory to which Aristotle subscribes is an unusual one because it does not allow for the possibility that individuals might appeal to natural law in order to critically evaluate existing laws and institutions. Rather its function is to provide legitimacy for existing laws and conventions by providing them with a philosophical justification from the standpoint of Aristotle’s metaphysics. Burns claims that this way of thinking about natural law can be traced in the writings of a number of thinkers in the history of philosophy, from Aquinas through to Hegel, but argues that because this tradition begins with Aristotle it is appropriate to describe it as ‘the Aristotelian natural law tradition.’
‘Tony Burns is a serious and highly respected researcher who has turned his mind to an important aspect of the natural law tradition, which has largely gone unnoticed, and has certainly been under explored. In a careful analysis the author draws out Aristotle's distinctive contribution arguing that the function the concept played in his thinking was not that of a criterion by which to criticise existing laws and institutions. Instead, within the context of Aristotle's metaphysics, it performed the function of philosophical justification. In enhancing our understanding of Aristotelian natural law Tony Burns provides us with an added analytical tool for exploring the complexities of how the concept was employed by subsequent thinkers. It is an important book which anyone interested in natural law cannot afford to ignore.'
Professor David Boucher
Tony Burns is Associate Professor of Politics at the University of Nottingham, UK. He is the author of Political Theory and Science Fiction: Ursula K. Le Guin and The Dispossessed (Lexington, 2008) and Natural Law and Political Ideology in the Philosophy of Hegel (Avebury, 1996). He is co-editor, with James Connelly (University of Hull, UK) of The Legacy of Leo Strauss (Imprint Academic, 2010); with Ian Fraser (Loughborough University, UK), of The Hegel-Marx Connection (Palgrave, 2000); and with Simon Thompson (University of West of England, UK), of Global Justice and the Politics of Recognition (Palgrave, 2012 forthcoming).
Conferences
A two-day conference was held in April 2011: 'Humanism in Agonistic Perspective: Themes from the work of Bonnie Honig’ . Read Conference report...
CONCEPT launched with a two day conference on 14 - 15 December 2010, Deliberative Democracy and Utopophobia. The launch lecture was given by Professor David Estlund, from Brown University, whose work formed the focus of the subsequent conference. More details...