Radical Natural Law: The Critical Standpoint of Animals and Nature

Eschewing anthropocentric framings, Radical Natural Law proposes a reconception of natural law that locates it in the critical standpoints of animals and other life forms in the natural world.

Engaging an impressively diverse range of thinkers and intellectual traditions, from conceptions of natural law in ancient Stoic and scholastic writings, to theoretical discussions about natural-world critical subjectivity in modern schools of thought, this book is an original and timely discussion that draws from within the Western philosophical tradition to make a case for the extension of natural law to non-human life.

Josephine Donovan identifies a common premise that she uses as the foundation for radical natural law: the fact that there are in all living organisms both an innate design or dynamic order and a centre of awareness or ’self’, who knows what the imperatives of that order are and seeks to satisfy the needs essential to survival as such

Josephine Donovan is Professor Emerita of English at the University of Maine, USA