This article raises certain classic considerations that Saint Thomas Aquinas formulated about the grounding of law as the product of reason and its relationship with the laws of men. The role of synderesis as a link between the individual and the ius naturae is analized, and it is concluded that the good life has its referent in “the rule of law” and in the practice of the moral virtues.

In this article the concepts of prudence and synderesis are contrasted, the first from the Aristotelian point of view and the second from the School of Paris. Prudence is defined as the method for achieving the desired ends and synderesis as the natural ability to judge rightly. Although it has been thought that they are two concepts unequipable, in this work I argue that ( Φρόνησις - phronesis) prudence and (Συντήρηοη - synderesis) synderresis are two moments which (...) are part of a theory of decision, with the condition that there are rational elements involved in moral deliberation, but, mostly,that is the product of an intuitive deliberation of person, based on first principles. (shrink)

This paper addresses the problem of evil from the perspective of saint Thomas Aquinas. It is argued that the nature of moral evil is in the individual who for some reason lost it departs from the pursuit of the good that is inherent to being. Synderesis is the only indissoluble bridge that man has with natural law and even with eternal. Converted into noluntas will guide man intrinsically evil acts but the synderesis, as a power with a natural (...) habit, is the best guide for the contingent decision-making under the rubric of the first practical principles from transcendent. (shrink)

The objective of this paper is to analyze the problem proposed by John R. Searle in the third chapter of his work Rationality in Action (2003) about the gap or distance that mediates between a decision and action, and how it intends to solve through the concept of the Self. We believe that this explanation is insufficient in some aspects and introduce the term Synderesis (Συντηρηοη in Greek) as argumentative line to defend the existence of decisions not contingent but (...) free from a Thomist perspective, in contrast to the proposal of the gap and the Self No-Humean. (Spanish). (shrink)

Within the Thomistic moral tradition, the is-ought gap is regularly treated as identical to the fact-value gap, and these two dichotomies are also regularly treated as being identical to Aristotle and Aquinas’s distinction between the practical and speculative intellect. The question whether (and if so, how) practical (‘ought’) knowledge derives from speculative (‘is’) knowledge has driven some of the fiercest disputes among the schools of Thomistic natural lawyers. I intend to show that both of these identifications are wrong and the (...) debate has been misframed. The is-ought gap is not the fact-value gap, nor does the is-ought gap correspond to Aquinas’s distinction between the speculative and practical. This opens the possibility of a resolution--within the Thomistic school--to a debate that has, heretofore, proven particularly resistant of consensus. I close by offering a tentative account of precisely how synderesis gives us our first awareness of moral law from a prior speculative understanding. (shrink)