#Utopia book 1 property rights how to#

It follows, then, that an entity cannot be the negation of itself. Thus, the basic process of identifying entities led, in 'classical' or Aristotelian logic, to the Law of Identity: a thing is, and cannot be anything other than, what it is: A is A. The same causes will always yield the same effects.įor the Aristotelian philosophers, logic was not a separate and isolated discipline, but an integral part of the natural law. Since natures are given and identifiable, the interactions of the various entities will be replicable under the same conditions. Events in the world can be traced back to the interactions of specific entities. We see, then, that the concepts of cause and effect are part and parcel of natural law analysis. All these entities - hydrogen, oxygen, and water - have specific discoverable properties or natures which can be identified. Thus, chemists may discover that when two molecules of hydrogen interact with one molecule of oxygen, the result is one molecule of a new entity, water. We can then say that the effect, Z, has been caused by the interaction of X and Y. Suppose, for example, that when a certain amount of X interacts with a given amount of Y we get a certain quantity of another thing, Z. If we can discover and learn about the natures of entities X and Y, then we can discover what happens when these two entities interact. If we see a cat walking down the street, we can immediately include it into a set of things, or animals, called 'cats' whose nature we have already discovered and analyzed. Man studies the world, then, by examining entities, identifying similar kinds of things, and classifying them into categories each with its own properties and nature. A stone, a cat, an elm tree each has its own particular nature, which man can discover, study and identify. Each thing has its own particular set of properties or attributes, its own nature, which distinguishes it from other kinds of things. By empirical fact there is more than one kind of thing in the universe in fact there are thousands, if not millions of kinds of things. Everything that is, is some particular thing, whether it be a stone, a cat, or a tree. Natural law rests on the crucial insight that to be necessarily means to be something, that is, some particular thing or entity. Led in particular by the great Athenian philosopher Aristotle (384-322 B.C.), a magnificent and creative systematizer known to later ages as The Philosopher, the Greeks evolved a theory and a method of reasoning and of science which later came to be called the natural law. In so doing, they gradually stopped worrying about the whims of the gods and to investigate actual entities around them. The Greeks, in contrast, were eager to use their reason - their sense observations and their command of logic - to investigate and learn about their world. Instead, the thing to do was to find out what the relevant gods wanted and then try to supply their needs. Such people would have considered it foolish to try to figure out the natural causes of rain or of thunder.

The way to bring on rain, then, or to curb violent thunderstorms, would be to find out what acts of man would please the god of rain or appease the thunder god. A violent thunderstorm, for example, might be ascribed to something that had irritated the god of thunder. Other tribes and peoples had tended to attribute natural events to arbitrary whims of the gods.

#Utopia book 1 property rights how to#

The Greeks were the first philosophers (philosophia - lovers of wisdom), the first people to think deeply and to figure out how to attain and verify knowledge about the world.

The ancient Greeks were the first civilized people to use their reason to think systematically about the world around them.

1.7 Aristotle: Private Property and Money.

1.5 Plato's Right-wing Collectivist Utopia.

1.3 The First 'Economist': Hesiod and the Problem of Scarcity.