This book has several strengths. The first is its structure. This book is a collection of mostly well-written essays that concerns, in one respect or another, natural law. The essays fall into one of the following parts: The concept of natural law, historical studies, controversial issues about natural law, and natural law and science. Part two's attention to the history of natural law among the theologians, like Thomas Aquinas, Frances Hutcheson, and Hugo Grotius, and the secularists, like Aristotle, Jeremy Bentham, and Adam Smith, is well-balanced. The history shows a change in the understanding of natural law. Also noteworthy is the discussion of the sharp disagreement in understanding the activity of God respecting nature. The split developed nicely into two categories: voluntarism (according to which the existence of values in the world ultimately is due to an act of God's will) and the realism (according to which values were ontologically inherent in the natural world). The latter became the accepted protestant view of natural law, and thereby "provided some basic continuity between scholastic and nineteenth-century moral and social thought".

Now the not so good news: This book is light in its discussion of the Stoics, who adhered to a kind of natural law. They had a deterministic understanding of natural law. All that occurs, they believed, was in accordance to the vital force that they referred to as natural law. This force meant that the universe has a structure to it, indeed logic to it. Even more, there was a purpose underlying whatever happens. Some essays (like 'Teleology: Inorganic and Organic' by David Oderberg) point out a similar metaphysical explanation of purpose in Aristotle, but only one essay even mentions the Stoics: 'First Principles and Practical Philosophy' by Alejandro Llano.

Another problem involves the un-translated sentences in Latin. No less than eight of the essays have several sentences in Latin without so much as a footnote of what the sentence is in English. This makes the reader have to do more work than what is expected of her--a reader should not have to look up words on the internet.

A third criticism has to do with the depth in which certain essays attempt to refute systems. This often involved a failure to engage with contemporary literature. Christopher Martin, for example, in his essay, 'The Relativity of Goodness: A Prolegomenon to a Rapprochement between Virtue Ethics and Natural Law Theory' attacks strict empiricism. He rightly calls attention to two notable twentieth century exponents of it: Ludwig Wittgenstein and W.V. Quine. When he claims that empiricism cannot be true for it, as he puts it, "cannot account for very many of the things that we do in fact know" (Anna Maria Gonzalez, 196), he offers as an example the property of being an American. The conjunction of "being an American" not being directly accessible to any of the five senses and there being no difficulty about knowing who is American entails the falsity of empiricism. But does it really? Perhaps, it is true that the naturalist might be hard pressed to account for the property of being an American. But this might be because it has yet to, not that it cannot. Martin's treatment of this fails to engage with some of the most important recent work. He mentions neither Michael Devitt's work, "There is No a Priori" nor George Rey's "A Naturalistic a priori."

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