ABSTRACT
Derided for many years as the dogmatic residue of Catholic moral theology, natural law theory has flourished in the last few decades and has done so despite the feet that there has never been a clear consensus on what 'natural law' is. The origins of the phrase and the influence of the idea have been sought in Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, the first century Jewish Platonist Philo, Cicero, the apostle Paul, various early Roman legal theorists, and a variety of medieval thinkers and their early modern commentators. Since Pope Leo XIII promulgated the encyclical Aeterni Patris in August 1879, the 'sense' has been that given to the thought of Thomas Aquinas by Catholic moral theologians. In Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (AMPLT), Finnis does not recant this position, but his reading of Thomas provides the opportunity to examine in detail the relation to the historical doctor communis to the new natural law theory.
