La città di Antigone. Etica, diritto naturale e persona in Robert Spaemann, Orthotes Editrice, Napoli 2015

The idea of "natural law", despite some attempts to recover its most current instances, still evokes the specter of an independent metaphysical entity, incompatible both with the most fundamental right of self-determination of the person and with the "modernity" of a reason now emancipated from any archaic reference to "nature". In such a framework, Robert Spaemann's proposal stands out for the originality of the way in which it combines the classical instance of natural law with the modern primacy of the person over nature and of practical reason over speculative reason. This essay contains a broad and detailed presentation of this attempt at synthesis, reconstructing its development and striving to maintain a dual fidelity: to the Author's texts, on the one hand, and to the need to further develop the questions they pose, on the other side. A perspective emerges in which the most authentic, and often misunderstood, meaning of "natural law" can only be appreciated in the paradox expressed by the traditional concept of recta ratio: the ratio, in fact, is called recta in reference to a nature that does not however, it is accessible naturalistically, and therefore regardless of that same ratio that conforms to it when it is recta. Outlining the implications of this paradox in the ethical, juridical-political and anthropological fields, Spaemann distances himself from both naturalism and personalism, to take the third path of a perspective in which the Aristotelian idea of nature does not exclude, but requires, that Kantian in person.