Hello, everyone. Thanks for welcoming me here. As was mentioned, I did my graduate studies in Toronto,

but I never made it to Kingston at that time because I was studying all the time. So it's good to finally see Kingston.

And I'm going to be talking mainly about Augustine, but towards the end I'm going to bring it into the reception of Augustine and of Cicero in Aquinas,

and then some 20th century use of Aquinas.

So covering kind of a large span of history, intellectual history, but that's where we're headed.

Ultimately, we're headed up to the 20th century.

So the way that I'm framing this presentation is asking about the relationship between freedom and law. And obviously, there's

an apparent conflict because if we think of our English word law, it's derived from the Latin

word licks, which comes from the word to bind.

So obviously laws bind us.

They attempt to put limitations on what we can do by telling us what not to do,

and then they try to make us do other things by telling us to do them.

And if freedom is a lack of constraint, then there's a conflict, right?

So one way of dealing with this is to take the approach that law is beneficial,

but it's actually not freeing.

So to just grant that there's a conflict and we're going to have to give up some of our freedom or all of our freedom if we want to have law.

And of course, this is a recurrent opinion in the history of ethics and legal theory that law is the lesser of two evils.

So one version of this is the social contract theory, right, which says that we give up some of our

freedoms in order to prevent personal injury to ourselves

and to prevent the loss of even more freedom of action that would occur if everyone

were to just pursue their own self-interest, willy-nilly. And of course, Plato's Republic

is sort of the Locus Classicus for this view. The view is put into the mouth

...