Does the concept of natural rights have roots, logical and historical, in the concept of natural law? Our answer is, ‘it depends’. By this, we mean that some conceptions across Western history do not in fact allow for the derivation of natural rights in the subjective sense. In contrast, others are conceived such that natural rights follow logically therefrom. Our premise is that talking about ‘natural law’ in the singular – at least in the period from Roman times to sixteenth-century – represents a distortion of on-the-ground realities.

With the new millennium, papal power sought to restore Christian rule in the Holy Land through a series of eight crusades, but these campaigns were military and political failures, especially at the expense of the Papacy. However, they did succeed in opening the way for the scholarship of the Islamic world to enter western European intellectual life. With the founding of universities, new scholarship slowly emerged. The pioneering teachings of Pierre Abélard, Roger Bacon, and Albertus Magnus led to a revival of interest in the ancient writers with their emphasis on rational thought to secure human knowledge. This movement, called Scholasticism, reached its pinnacle with the writings of St. Thomas Aquinas who sought a reconciliation of Aristotle’s rationalism and Christian theology. A major implication of Aquinas’ success was the acceptance by scholars within the universities and the Church that both reason and faith serve as sources of human knowledge. William of Ockham extended the Scholastic movement and his predecessor Roger Bacon by presented a law of parsimony in scientific explanation, which in turn laid the foundation of empirical science.

Peirce’s c.1902 taxonomy of the sciences is briefly described, stressing its anti-foundationalist formulation. That taxonomy identified philosophy as a science of discovery and divided it into several empirical, albeit very general, inquiries. Of these, phaneroscopy (phenomenology) is the most basic. Phaneroscopy depends not only on empiricism’s expansion (Chapter 7) but also on a vocabulary of phaneroscopic description, free of metaphysical assumptions, drawn from the algebra of relations. The resulting three phaneroscopic categories are here developed systematically. Peirce’s 1903 reformulation of pragmatism (Chapter 4) mandated a phaneroscopic account of the meaning of modal and metaphysical ideas – of possibility, actuality, and, especially, law – by which to establish the meaningfulness of modal realism. This implies that some forms of lawfulness are directly perceived. But direct (i.e., non-inferential) perception of lawfulness does not prove law’s reality, which must remain a hypothesis supported, never proven, by common experience and especially by the progress of scientific inquiry.

Chapter 10 studies theories of demonic obstinacy, the state in which the fallen angels or demons are unable to avoid sinning and have a limited ability to do good. The external cause of obstinacy is God’s refusal to offer them the grace of repentance and of justification. Beginning with Aquinas, theologians searched in addition for an internal, psychological cause of their obstinacy – a great challenge, given their shared belief that the angels’ will is by nature oriented to the good. Aquinas traces their obstinacy to the fixity of their cognition, and Henry of Ghent to the forcefulness of their will. Certain Franciscan thinkers explain the demons’ obstinacy by means of a divine intervention, binding their will to evil (Olivi), causing their immoderate self-love (Scotus), causing in them a habit of wickedness (Auriol), or even causing in them hatred of God (Ockham). Durand of St. Pourçain returns to the standard account prior to Aquinas, which explains the demons’ obstinacy by a divine decision, with no reference to their psychological condition. In addition to the cause of obstinacy, theologians discussed whether the demons, though necessarily obstinate, are nevertheless free.

Chapter 5 concerns the free will debate in the early fourteenth century. It thoroughly discusses the Franciscans Duns Scotus and William of Ockham, who make a sharp distinction between will and nature, that is, between a free power or cause that controls its act and one whose act is determined by external circumstances. Scotus and Ockham make the will more independent from a cognized good than previous thinkers. Using unedited texts, the chapter also presents what may well be the strongest statement of intellectualism at the time, by John of Pouilly, who builds on Godfrey of Fontaines to explain why, although our choices are moved by the cognized object, we control our choices. More briefly, the Dominicans Hervaeus Natalis and Durand of St. Pourçain are considered, whose general approach resembles Pouilly’s. As a thinker developing an intermediary theory, the chapter studies Peter Auriol, according to whom the will controls directly which judgment considered during deliberation becomes the final judgment that causes one’s choice. The dividing issue among these thinkers is, at bottom, whether the will controls its acts directly or only by means of deliberation.