![]() | Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law One of the central problems in the history of moral and political philosophy since antiquity has been to explain how human society and its civil institutions came into being. In attempting to solve this problem philosophers developed the idea of natural law, which for many centuries was used to describe the system of fundamental, rational principles presumed universally to govern human behavior in society. By the eighteenth century the doctrine of natural law had engendered the related doctrine of natural rights, which gained reinforcement most famously in the American and French revolutions. According to this view, human society arose through the association of individuals who might have chosen to live alone in scattered isolation and who, in coming together, were regarded as entering into a social contract. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was perhaps the most systematic of the post-Kantian idealist German philosophers. T. M. Knox translated many of Hegel's works into English. Harry Burrows Acton (1908-1974) was a British academic philosopher known for defending the morality of capitalism. John R. Silber was president of Boston University from 1971 until 1996. |
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