John Finnis b. 1940
John Finnis (born 1940) is an Australian-British philosopher of the Contemporary era, associated with Analytic Philosophy, Christian Philosophy, and Political Philosophy.
John Finnis is an Australian-British legal and moral philosopher, emeritus professor of law at Oxford and a long-time professor at the University of Notre Dame. Natural Law and Natural Rights, his major work, reconstructed the natural law tradition of Aquinas in contemporary terms, identifying a list of basic human goods that practical reason recognizes as self-evidently choiceworthy and a set of principles for choosing reasonably among them. His later Aquinas and Fundamentals of Ethics extended this program into a comprehensive Catholic moral and political philosophy.
John Mitchell Finnis was born at Adelaide in July 1940. He took his bachelor's in law at the University of Adelaide in 1961, went to University College, Oxford, as a Rhodes Scholar, and completed his DPhil in 1965 under H. L. A. Hart with a thesis on the idea of judicial power. He was received into the Roman Catholic Church in 1962. Elected a fellow of University College in 1966, he held the Oxford chair of law and legal philosophy and from 1995 the Biolchini Family Professorship at the Notre Dame Law School concurrently, retiring from both in 2010 as professor emeritus.
His books include Natural Law and Natural Rights (1980), Fundamentals of Ethics (1983), Nuclear Deterrence, Morality and Realism (1987, with Joseph Boyle and Germain Grisez), Moral Absolutes (1991), Aquinas: Moral, Political, and Legal Theory (1998), and the five-volume Collected Essays (2011).
Finnis is the leading exponent of the 'new natural law' theory developed with Grisez and Boyle, on which a small list of self-evident basic human goods — life, knowledge, play, aesthetic experience, sociability, practical reasonableness, and religion — provide the principles of practical reason that ground both morality and law. The theory underwrites a robust Catholic legal philosophy and a series of conservative positions on the moral questions of contemporary public life.
Key facts
- Nationality
- Australian-British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic Philosophy, Christian Philosophy, Political Philosophy
Selected quotes
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“There are basic human goods that reason grasps as good in themselves.”
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“Natural law is what reason perceives in the structure of the goods of human nature.”
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“Practical reason proceeds from the basic goods to the principles of reasonableness.”
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“A law contrary to the basic goods is not, in the proper sense, law at all.”
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Attributed to John Finnis:
“Reason and faith share the goods of the human person; they are not foreign to each other.”
John Finnis by topic
Frequently asked about John Finnis
- When was John Finnis born?
- John Finnis was born in 1940.
- Where was John Finnis from?
- John Finnis is an Australian-British philosopher of the Contemporary era.
- What philosophical movements is John Finnis associated with?
- John Finnis is associated with Analytic Philosophy, Christian Philosophy, and Political Philosophy.
- What is John Finnis known for?
- John Finnis is an Australian-British legal and moral philosopher, emeritus professor of law at Oxford and a long-time professor at the University of Notre Dame.
- How many quotes are attributed to John Finnis?
- There are 6 attributed quotations from John Finnis in the 1001Philosophers collection, organized by topic.