TAKING NOTE OF ARISTOTLE
As I read slowly along in Aristotle 's classic, NICOMACHEAN ETHICS, I have encountered language that is strangely redolent of that found in law school horn books, texts, on justice and injustice; natural law and , unnatural law, i.e. man made law.
He writes:
"Of political justice part is natural , part legal--natural that which everywhere has the same force and does not exist by people's thinking this or that; legal, that which is originally indifferent, but when it has been laid down is not indifferent...
"There is a difference between the act of injustice and what is unjust, and between the act of justice and what is just; for a thing is unjust by nature or by enactment ; and this very thing, when it has been done , is an act of injustice, but before it is done is not yet that but is unjust. So, too , with an act of justice (though the term is rather 'just action ' and 'act of justice' is applied to the correction of the act of injustice )."
As I read these passages from the sage, Aristotle , I cannot help but recall that it was the Catholic priest, Galileo Galilei, who risked excommunication (or worse), in order to demonstratively affirm the earlier, iconoclastic Catholic priest's, Copernicus' proofs; proofs of his heliocentric conceptions of the earth's cosmos; meaning by that, sun-centered, not the earth-centered cosmos that had long been adopted as doctrine by the church. Galileo's telescopic astral observations and mathematical proofs helped mightily to bring down Aristotle from the realm of unspoken scientific demigod at the foundational base of Holy Roman Catholicism. The church had relied, for centuries, upon the accuracy of the early book "The Almagest" of Claudius Ptolemy to prove its geocentric model of cosmic creation upon which the Bible was based; it was also rooted in Aristotle's errant expostulations.
So. If Aristotle is found wanting in those two or three respects: heliocentricism , astronomy, and by extension orthodox Catholic doctrine, he may also have erred in relation to law. I say this since, he has also written, "Of all things just and lawful each is related as the universal to its particulars ; for the things that are done are many, but of 'them' each is one, since it is universal."
P. 1014 (1991) all quotes same page
Aristotle as the "universal" has been found wanting in several "particulars", already. Law may be next, if the rigor of Copernicus and Galileo Galilei is brought back to bear again upon the mavens of law.
