The Contemporary Analytic Natural Law: Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy
In 2025, the so-called “New Natural Law” Theory will be approximately sixty years old. In 1965, in what was then called the Natural Law Forum Germain Grisez (1929-2018) published an article whose stated aim was to correct certain misunderstandings of St. Thomas Aquinas’s view of the first principles of the natural law. Since then, Grisez and subsequent collaborators started to identify the foundations of ethics in practical principles directing agents to aspects of human flourishing in an all-round reasonable manner.
To unearth the moral, political philosophical and legal foundations of this natural law theory, the Research Institute for Politics and Government (RIPG) at the University of Public Service (UPS) in Budapest initiated a three-year long research project with the title “Analytical Thomism and Natural Law: Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy” in January 2022. The principal investigators are Johanna Fröhlich, Ferenc Hörcher, and Christopher Tollefsen. The project aims to produce three volumes and involves various international conferences. The first volume will include some of the most fundamental texts from the New Natural Law Theory as well as texts representative of that theory’s partial roots in the Analytic Thomist movement that emerged in Oxford in the 1950s. The second volume will be a Hungarian translation of these selected writings. Finally, the third book will be an edited volume in English with original scholarship by an international group of researchers presently working under the aegis of the New Natural Law Theory.
Leaders of project: Ferenc Hörcher, Johanna Fröhlich, Christopher Tollefsen
Partners:
The James Madison Program, University of Princeton, USA
The Programme for the Foundations of Law and Constitutional Governance, University of Oxford, UK
Mathias Corvinus Collegium, Hungary
Past events:
Online Workshop on the Concept Note with professors Jeffrey Pojanowski, Paul Yowell, Sherif Girgis, Petar Popovic, Pier Paolo Pigozzi, Ferenc Hörcher, Christopher Tollefsen, and Johanna Fröhlich. June 14, 2022.
Online Workshop with Christopher Tollefsen and the Hungarian Translation team. December 1, 2022.
Love Hath Reason – The Contemporary Analytic Natural Law and its Moral, Political and Legal Philosophy. Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Santiago de Chile, November 9th, 2023.
Upcoming events:
Natural Law for Real Life Problems, September 19-20, Budapest, Hungary. Keynote: Prof. John Finnis, University of Oxford and University of Notre Dame, and Prof. Robert P. George, University of Princeton
International Conference, University of Princeton, November 14-15th, 2024.