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This module, team-taught by members of the two departments, provides an overview of approaches to customs, laws, and justice from Classical Greek thought to the Renaissance. It confronts theories of the relationships between customs, laws and justice, with particular attention to important concepts such as justice as a virtue, arithmetical and geometrical equality, distributive and corrective justice, the variability of customs, the emergence of ideas of natural law and even of subjective natural rights. Texts will range from the Greek Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, the Stoics, Roman legal codes, St Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae, FitzRalph, de Vitoria, las Casas, and Hobbes. One particular theme that will be explored across the centuries is the relation of justice and slavery, with regard to relevant issues of the ius gentium, natural rights, individual freedom, and property.
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