The Evolution of Natural Law in the Greco-Roman Period

• Main Authors: Ju-Yu Chen, 陳儒玉
• Other Authors: Shih-Tsung Wang
• Format: Others
• Language: zh-TW
• Published: 2014
• Online Access: http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/96674098722577222977

碩士 === 國立臺灣大學 === 歷史學研究所 === 102 === The article aims to expound the meaning of the evolvement of natural law in the Greco-Roman period and thereby to argue the characteristic of natural law. The implication of the concept of natural law is uncertain and ambiguous. However, the concept of natural law could be understood as a way to explain affairs of human life according to natural phenomenon or natural principles. Normally, Scholars interpreted what “nature” is to obtain support for their opinions on the world or life. In the early Greek civilization, Pre-Socratic philosophers investigated the substances of matter as an attempt to explain what the principles of the universe were. The concept of natural law appears when Heraclitus and the Pythagoreans indicated that it was the same principle that explained the physical world and human life. The assertions of natural law afterwards, however, diverted to be the expressions of the scholars’ view of life. The Sophists claimed that the law of jungle as law of nature regarded as the standard for society. In the Hellenistic period, the ethics of the Old Academy, Stoicism and Epicureanism were based on the natural principles which were generalized by Pre-Socratic philosophers. Nevertheless, realizing that the principles of nature were insufficient for the explanation of the first cause of the universe and worldly affairs, later Roman Stoics identified nature with Providence or Supreme Being. Another tendency of natural law in Roman imperial age towards realistic, Roman law embodied the Stoic spirit of natural law. The definition of natural law remain uncertain in the Greco-Roman period but was confirmed in Judaism and Christianity, especially in Christian theology, as reason or human’s participation in God’s wisdom.