Ulpian’s Influence on Aquinas’s Natural Law

2021 ◽  
Vol 46 (8) ◽  
pp. 3-4
Author(s):  
Benedict M. Guevin ◽  

Ulpian was an influential name in the history of Roman law and beyond. His definition of Natural Law, while a source of some controversy in the thirteenth century, greatly influenced St. Thomas Aquinas’s own definition. This paper explores that influence, its origins, and its implications in Aquinas’s most famous writings.

1934 ◽  
Vol 24 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-153 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fritz Pringsheim

The reign of Hadrian marks the beginning of a new epoch in Roman administration and in the history of Roman Law. Hadrian's visit to Britain is immortalised by the Wall which he built from Tyne to Solway. Its construction is characteristic of the Emperor's willingness to renounce further conquests and even to abandon land which had been Roman. The Wall marked the limit of the districts which he was prepared to retain and administer. It followed, not the shortest and easiest route, but a line beyond the fortified area whence a look-out could be kept over the barbarians outside, and its object was the completion and definition of the fortified frontier region whereby it became easier to civilise and to pacify the country which lay to the south. Hadrian's aim was to bring order and peace to the land bounded by the new frontiers of the Roman world. Thus Hadrian may be sharply contrasted with his predecessor Trajan, the soldier on the throne, who owed his elevation to his successful wars in the Rhine region, and who as Emperor extended the frontiers of the Empire on the lower Danube and in the East. On Hadrian's accession the Empire was more powerful than ever before or afterwards, but its financial and military resources were strained to the utmost, and indeed frequently had been overstrained. The small peasant owners and small towns, sources of Roman culture and prosperity, had begun to suffer and disappear.


Traditio ◽  
1943 ◽  
Vol 1 ◽  
pp. 355-408 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaines Post

By the end of the thirteenth century the royal writ of summons to Parliament usually specified that communities send representatives with “full power” to consent to whatever should be ordained by the king in his court and council. This “full power” was the famous plena potestas which was stated in the mandates carried by knights and burgesses to Parliament and by delegates of cities and towns to Cortes and States General, and which is still current in proxies for stockholders' meetings. It has, of course, like almost every word of the terminology in documents relating to representation, challenged interpretation: on the one side is the argument of J. G. Edwards, who confines himself to England, that plena potestas implied an almost political or sovereign consent which limited the royal authority; on the other, the assumption that it was an expression of involuntary consent to the acts and decisions of the royal government. In general, of course, whatever modern scholars have decided as to the right of consent has resulted either from modern conceptions of representation or from a strict interpretation of the terminology in the sources for the history of assemblies. No one has examined plena potestas in the light of the legal theory and procedure of the thirteenth century It is possible that by studying how legists and canonists viewed the meaning of plena potestas—for it, like most of the terminology in the mandate, came from Roman Law—we can find at least a relatively new approach to the problem of medieval consent.


Author(s):  
Emanuele Conte

In this article I wish to show how history of legal doctrines can assist in a better understanding of the legal reasoning over a long historical period. First I will describe the nineteenth century discussion on the definition of law as a ‘science’, and some influences of the medieval idea of science on the modern definition. Then, I’ll try to delve deeper into a particular doctrinal problem of the Middle Ages: how to fit the feudal relationship between lord and vassal into the categories of Roman law. The scholastic interpretation of these categories is very original, to the point of framing a purely personal relationship among property rights. The effort made by medieval legal culture to frame the reality into the abstract concepts of law can be seen as the birth of legal dogmatics.


1979 ◽  
Vol 5 (3) ◽  
pp. 260-272 ◽  
Author(s):  
E. B. F. Midgley

In my study, The Natural Law Tradition and the Theory of International Relations, reviewed in Hedley Bull's interesting article, there are no chapters devoted to natural law thinkers before the thirteenth century. Any lengthening of an already long manuscript might have diminished its prospects of publication. In the absence of a full survey of the strengths and weaknesses of earlier theories, there are various explicit or implied judgements on positions of Aristotle, the Stoics, Cicero and Augustine in chapters dealing primarily with other matters. Whilst referring to sources of Aquinas's doctrine, I did not give a detailed account of the historical formation of his teaching. I concentrated upon St. Thomas's discussion of the various kinds of law and especially upon the doctrine of eternal law which he brought to a certain perfection. In doing this, I was consoled by the view which I shared with Vincent McNabb that “it was always the thought of Aquinas never the history of that thought which seemed of greatest worth…” Indeed, given the incompleteness of so much of the discussion on the intellectual reconciliation of natural and divine law before Aquinas, it is arguable that McNabb was hardly exaggerating very greatly when he wrote that Aquinas's treatise on law in the Summa theologiae “would seem be the first great treatise ever written on law”.


Vivarium ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 56 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 340-366
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Martin

Abstract The history of thinking about consequences in the Middle Ages divides into three periods. During the first of these, from the eleventh to the middle of the twelfth century, and the second, from then until the beginning of the fourteenth century, the notion of natural consequence played a crucial role in logic, metaphysics, and theology. The first part of this paper traces the development of the theory of natural consequence in Abaelard’s work as the conditional of a connexive logic with an equivalent connexive disjunction and the crisis precipitated by the discovery of inconsistency in this system. The second part considers the accounts of natural consequence given in the thirteenth century as a special case of the standard modal definition of consequence, one for which the principle ex impossibili quidlibet does not hold, in logics in which disjunction is understood extensionally.


Religions ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (3) ◽  
pp. 160
Author(s):  
Tzahi Weiss

The turn of the thirteenth century is a formative period for the historiography of medieval Jewish thought. These years saw the dissemination of the Hebrew translations of the Maimonidean corpus, alongside the simultaneous appearance of the first Kabbalistic treatises, in the same geographical regions. This concurrent appearance led scholars to examine Jewish theological discourse mainly via two juxtaposed categories: “Philosophy” and “Kabbalah”. In this paper, I will return to that formative moment in order to demonstrate that exploring Jewish history of ideas beyond the scope of these categories could be very advantageous in improving our understanding of both categories and the Jewish theological inner-dynamics in this period as a whole. I will draw attention to a contemporary theological attitude, which is neither Kabbalistic nor philosophical, which I will define as a medieval form of Jewish binitarianism. My argument in this paper will be composed of two parts—first, outlining the nature of this medieval Jewish theological trend, and second, showing how a precise definition of this belief within its context alters crucial notions and understandings in the common scholarly historiography of medieval Jewish thought.


Traditio ◽  
2001 ◽  
Vol 56 ◽  
pp. 53-88 ◽  
Author(s):  
Adam J. Kosto

The twelfth-century legal compilation known as the Usatges de Barcelona holds an important place in the history of Catalonia. Recognized as authoritative by kings and parliaments alike from at least the thirteenth century, the Usatges were integrated into the official collection of Catalan law commissioned by the Corts and the new king of Aragón, Fernando de Antequera, in 1412–13. The work of the jurists who carried out this task was eventually fixed in print (in Catalan) in 1495 as the Constitutions y altres drets de Cathalunya, which was reissued in 1588–89 and again in 1704. The Usatges thus formed part of the law of the region for over 500 years, until the suppression of Catalan local law in the Decreto de Nueva Planta of 1716; thereafter, they survived — and still survive — as a focus of Catalan nationalism and regional pride. For medieval historians, the Usatges usefully supplement Catalonia's abundant documentary evidence, evidence unaccompanied before the thirteenth century by significant narrative sources. Individual articles cover such diverse topics as composition payments for injuries, guidelines for judicial proceedings, inheritance rules, military obligation, the status of Jews and Muslims, marriage, rape, treason, and public highways. Drawn from and influenced by a wide variety of sources — including the Visigothic code, Roman law, comital charters, and royal decrees — they provide valuable information about legal traditions and reasoning in Catalonia.


2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 17-26
Author(s):  
Snežana Radovanović

The definition of human and minority rights is grounded on ideas of ius naturale. These ideas are developed in later progress of human society and legal theory and are adjusted to new social conditions. Thus, modern ius naturale parcially differs from original, primarly developed idea od ius nature (from the era od natural law in works of Platon, Aristotel, sophists. In materia of human and minority rights, ideas of ius naturale developed by sophists are in the function of explanation the universality and general acceptance of legal protection of human and minority rights and day to day development.


Author(s):  
A. Lefebvre-Teillard

Abstract The Parisian School of Law (end of the 12th to the beginning of the 13th century). The lecture of which the text is published below, was presented at the 'International Days' of the Society for the History of Law that was held in Bologna in May 2018. It aims to reflect on the research carried out on the Parisian school since the famous speech by Stephen Kuttner made at the 1937 Journées in Paris on 'The beginnings of the French canonist school'. Born after the publication of Gratian's Decretum, the Parisian school first developed during the long pontificate of Alexander III (1159–1181). Summae, distinctions and quaestiones about the Decretum developed during the 1180s, due to the presence of three very active 'Englishmen' in particular: Rodoicus Modicipassus, Ricardus de Mores (known as 'Ricardus the Englishman') and Honorius de Kent. Without neglecting the theological aspects, all three appeal to Roman law in their works, but also to the new pontifical decretals. The first decade of the thirteenth century was then marked by the publication of two important apparati on the Decretum: Ecce vicit leo and Animal est substantia, whose authors turn resolutely to Roman law. A specific teaching in the latter seems to have emerged during the same period, which sees the flourishing of the ius novum, a new teaching based on the Campilatio prima by Bernardus of Pavia. This dual orientation would then be strongly criticised by some theologians, for whom Paris was their undisputed centre of study. They then obtained a prohibition on the teaching of Roman law in Paris from Pope Honorius III in 1219.


Author(s):  
Sergey Vasil'ev ◽  
Vyacheslav Schedrin ◽  
Aleksandra Slabunova ◽  
Vladimir Slabunov

The aim of the research is a retrospective analysis of the history and stages of development of digital land reclamation in Russia, the definition of «Digital land reclamation» and trends in its further development. In the framework of the retrospective analysis the main stages of melioration formation are determined. To achieve the maximum effect of the «digital reclamation» requires full cooperation of practical experience and scientific potential accumulated throughout the history of the reclamation complex, and the latest achievements of science and technology, which is currently possible only through the full digitalization of reclamation activities. The introduction of «digital reclamation» will achieve greater potential and effect in the modernization of the reclamation industry in the «hightech industry», through the use of innovative developments and optimal management decisions.


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