Articles by Zachary Reyna
Law and the Senses: SMELL, 2020
This article examines Aquinas’s thinking about law and nature to show that for Aquinas natural la... more This article examines Aquinas’s thinking about law and nature to show that for Aquinas natural law is not about deriving or finding normative rules (standards) in the order of the cosmos or requirements of practical rationality. Rather, I argue that for Aquinas, natural law is a distinctive way of theorizing relationality and embodiment in the “sublunary realm”: one that aims at “friendship” across species lines (STI-II99.2-3). The word Aquinas uses to describe this ecological practice is synderesis. For Aquinas, synderesis is both the human-creaturely capacity to grasp the analogical structuring of reality and the “disposition” that allows us to work on transforming this reality into belonging-together through our participation in natural law (STI79; DV15-17). Synderesis is thus of central importance to Aquinas’s account of natural law, yet it is largely overlooked by modern natural law theorists. The article concludes by exploring how Aquinas’s natural law thinking might contribute to an environmental politics of friendship.
Conference Presentations by Zachary Reyna
17 April 2020, European University St Petersburg presentation
What I want to present to you today is an argument for why NATURE, as a concept and term of art, ... more What I want to present to you today is an argument for why NATURE, as a concept and term of art, should be retained by contemporary environmental political theory despite some recent claims by theorists like Bruno Latour and environmental historians like William Cronon to the contrary. In other words, what I want to do is offer an argument for what NATURE might continue to offer us as 21 st century participants engaging in the critical task of rethinking the boundaries between nature and politics, the human and nonhuman etc. Or, one last time, what we lose when we jettison NATURE as a concept. To do this I'll turn to the work of St Thomas Aquinas and in particular his account of natural law. And my answer in short—just to preview— is that what we lose when we abandon the concept NATURE is something like the ability to belong to, to establish and work at friendship with—these are Aquinas's words—the more-than-human world we inhabit. And the crucial point I think-and that I hope to make-is that this friendship goes beyond merely acknowledging our interconnectedness and hybridity—as important as that may be—and requires a certain care for and respect for boundaries as anyone who has ever tried to make friends and failed knows.
Syllabi by Zachary Reyna
Book Reviews by Zachary Reyna
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Articles by Zachary Reyna
Conference Presentations by Zachary Reyna
Syllabi by Zachary Reyna
Book Reviews by Zachary Reyna