Books by James Bernard Murphy

James Bernard Murphy challenges widely shared assumptions about personhood and its development through discrete stages, arguing they undermine our ability to see our lives as a whole. Drawing on classic and contemporary thinkers, Murphy argues that we live our whole lives as children, adolescents, and adults all at the same time.

This concerns the dignity and the degradation of labour. Work has great power to undermine or to foster happiness. Bernard feels the moral dimension of labour has been neglected in political theory and practice and he aims to restore productive labour to its place in moral and political debate.

In this first book-length study of positive law, James Bernard Murphy rewrites central chapters in the history of jurisprudence by uncovering a fundamental continuity among four great legal philosophers: Plato, Thomas Aquinas, Thomas Hobbes, and John Austin. In their theories of positive law, Murphy argues, these thinkers represent successive chapters in a single fascinating story. That story revolves around a fundamental ambiguity: is law positive because it is deliberately imposed (as opposed to customary law) or because it lacks moral necessity (as opposed to natural law)? These two senses of positive law are not coextensive yet the discourse of positive law oscillates unstably between them. What, then, is the relation between being deliberately imposed and lacking moral necessity? Murphy demonstrates how the discourse of positive law incorporates both normative and descriptive dimensions of law, and he discusses the relation of positive law not only to jurisprudence but also to the philosophy of language, ethics, theories of social order, and biblical law.

St Augustine and Roman law are the two bridges from Athens and Jerusalem to the world of modern law. This title describes the life and world of Augustine and the ways in which he conceived both justice and law. It discusses the little recognized Augustinian contributions to the field of modern hermeneutics.