Lessons in Principles & Prudence from Aristotle & the Ancients with Alex Petkas

About this episode

Whenever we at the James Wilson Institute begin one of our weeklong fellowships or even our weekend introductory seminars on Natural Law Jurisprudence, we begin not with the writings of our institute’s namesake or even other familiar figures from the Founding. Instead we begin, as Prof. Hadley Arkes’s classic book First Things begins, with the opening pages of Aristotle’s Politics on that moral association we call the polis and how articulating understanding of rights and obligations, those markers of political life unique to human beings, springs from the very nature of human beings as the only creatures that can reason about such things. Natural law or right reason, before it became a…