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Whenever we at the James Wilson Institute begin one of our weeklong fellowships or even our weekend introductory seminars on Natural Law Jurisprudence, we begin not with the writings of our institute’s namesake or even other familiar figures from the Founding. Instead we begin, as Prof. Hadley Arkes’s classic book First Things begins, with the opening pages of Aristotle’s Politics on that moral association we call the polis and how articulating understanding of rights and obligations, those markers of political life unique to human beings, springs from the very nature of human beings as the only creatures that can reason about such things. Natural law or right reason, before it became a necessary tool for lawyers, was simply this to Aristotle: a way of understanding how human beings are made to flourish, and politics either serves that end or it fails. Scholar and expert on Aristotle's writings, Alex Petkas, joins us on this week's Anchoring Truths Podcast episode for something of a deep dive into a good bit of the philosophy animating much of our work at the Institute.
Petkas holds a PhD in Classics from Princeton. He taughtancient philosophy, rhetoric, and Greco-Roman history at Princeton, UC San Diego, and on the tenure track at Cal State Fresno. He also hosts The Cost of Glory Podcast, on which he retells Plutarch’s Parallel Lives—the biographies of statesmen, generals, orators, and founders that have trained ambitious men for two thousand years.
