Between June 28 and July 3, 2026, Istanbul, Turkey, will host the 32nd World Congress of the International Association for the Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy.
Workshop "The normative force of nature"
“Yes, I broke. Becauseit’s your law, not the law of God.
Natural justice, which is of all times and places…
They speak the language of eternity,
are not written down, and never change…
And no man’s arrogance or power
can make me disobey them.
Antigone, Sophocles.
The Iuris Naturalis Societas (www.iurisnaturalis.com), an international association of jurists who defend the legal and political transcendence of nature, is organizing this workshop about “the normative force of nature”.
Contemporary environmental sensitivity has reinforced the classical Rousseauian antithesis between nature and culture. At the same time, the so-called “gender perspective” and forms of transhumanism—such as that advanced by the influential writer Yuval N. Harari in Homo Deus—adopt an existentialist conception of the human being as causa sui: a demiurge who designs his own essence through an omnipotent freedom. Yet the naïve aspiration to create a ‘superhuman’, collapses once we lose any clear understanding of what it means to be human. It would seem at first glance that law breaks all ties with nature. But we see that the idea of nature continues to gain strength across all fields, including the legal.
From Constantinople—a bridge between East and West—Emperor Justinian projected the categories of Roman law onto the wider world. He consolidated them as ratio scripta: a rationally articulated legal order embodying universal principles of justice and giving juridical form to classical natural law theory that had emerged in Ancient Greece.
In this workshop, there is room for all proposals that help reflect on the relationship between nature and law, especially those that help re-evaluate the normative force of the classical concept of “natural law”.
After a valuation process, the papers will be published in a peer-reviewed journal.
Proposals for papers can be sent to the following email address: info@iurisnaturalis.com