This work approaches international law as more than merely information contained in international legal norms, & does not view international law as a body of ...

Few will deny that Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics is the best-known work on moral philosophy. It is a well-trodden field for the commentator. Indeed one occasionally has the feeling that it is the very proliferation of commentary that makes further guidance necessary and justifies a new commentator. But one hastens to add that the author of the present volume does very much more than simply sort out the differences between the interpretations offered by his predecessors in the field. That not unimportant (...) task he does very skilfully. But his main preoccupation is ‘to give an account of Aristotle’s main ethical doctrines, and to justify interpretations by the detailed scrutiny of particular passages, often very familiar passages’. He goes on to remark that in the study of Aristotle familiarity can be an obstacle to understanding. (shrink)

This volume is the first of a new series, ‘Traditio Christiana, Texts and Commentary on Patristic Theology’. The aim is to print the outstanding patristic texts, in their original Latin or Greek, on a given topic and to accompany them with translation and commentary. The specialist and the layman are thus put in a position of having direct contact with the sources of Church teaching. The aim is ecumenical, too; for here is common ground between the various confessions.

As its title suggests, this book is a discussion of ‘three starting-points, three different ways of throwing light on what ethics is all about’ ; it asks the question: Is ethics basically love, law or language? The first chapter, ‘Ethics as Love’, looks critically at what is generally identified as the situationist approach—‘All you need is love’. The New Testament insistence upon the primacy of love over law is well-known; but this must be balanced by appreciation of the fact that (...) the law in question is the ceremonial law—Christ nowhere sets aside the moral law in favour of love. There remains the question of the status of moral rules; are they absolute or are they simply convenient rules of thumb suffering exceptions? The criticism of the latter view is searching without presenting anything novel. What is love? How does one know that an action is a loving action? To understand the meaning of love one must have experience—love is that kind of term. A consequence is that, even if we cannot positively describe all that is in love, we need at least to be able to state what love is not ‘however open-ended the term may otherwise be’. Love must exclude certain kinds of behaviour if it is to have any meaning; can sexual perversion or the killing of babies ever be an expression of love? On the other hand the word love is a ‘growing’ word and if its meaning occasionally outstrips semantic rules there must remain what the author calls a ‘revolutionary continuity between what love now means for us and what it used to mean’. Again, the idea of ‘situation’ is a good deal more complex than situationist theories sometimes allow. It is something more than the personal face-to-face encounter and must take in much wider fields of human relationship. Furthermore the individual usually finds himself in a number of overlapping situations the demands of which will frequently conflict. All this is well said; and it needs to be said, for situationism of the ‘only love counts’ variety is more prone than most theories to be content with re-assertion instead of meeting telling criticism. (shrink)

This interesting study in religious sociology takes as its subject the various attitudes of society towards death. These attitudes are reflected in the mass-media of communication. Ten daily news papers published in Paris in a given week in 1969 were systematically studied for references to death; likewise the 399 films shown in Paris-cinemas during 1968, the television programmes for the first six-months of 1969 and the popular songs broadcast from two selected radio stations. The result is found in three long (...) chapters. The first is devoted to violent death—murders, suicides, deaths in traffic accidents, etc. The second chapter takes up the more subjective attitudes in the face of death—scientific detachment, fear, horror, black humour. And the third chapter documents the commercial and business aspects of death—the economics of the pompes funébres. (shrink)