Ideas have histories

The World layer situates the chapter's people, concepts, texts, and traditions so context sharpens rather than replaces philosophical reading.

People

Thinkers in this chapter

Painted portrait of Thomas Aquinas in a black-and-white Dominican habit, holding an open book and a model church.

Featured thinker

Plato

author of Euthyphro

Permanent biography

Scholarly layer

People beside the reading

Follow the people, texts, and intellectual connections surrounding this chapter.

Thomas Aquinas, detail from a painting by Carlo Crivelli.Image: St-thomas-aquinasFXD · Carlo Crivelli. Public domain. Modified: Locally auto-oriented, metadata-stripped, resized without enlargement to at most 720px wide, and encoded as WebP quality 82. Wikimedia Commons record, reviewed revision 1176467112.

Featured thinker

Thomas Aquinas

natural-law theorist

Open permanent biography

Why this person matters here

natural-law theorist

Aquinas separates rational moral authority from simple command-following.

Passage records: ch05-p0030, ch05-p0031, ch05-p0034

Summa Theologiae, I-II, Questions 90-91

Author: Thomas Aquinas
Locator: Summa Theologiae, I-II, Question 90, Article 4
Edition or translation: Fathers of the English Dominican Province, second revised edition (1920)

Thus from the four preceding articles, the definition of law may be gathered; and it is nothing else than an ordinance of reason for the common good, made by him who has care of the community, and promulgated.

Primary source for Aquinas's definition of law and four kinds of law.

Text rights: Public-domain translation in the United States.

Open the linked source

Read across the chapter

Other people in this chapter

Plato