The Structure of Theological Revolutions

Abstract Using Thomas Kuhn’s understanding of “paradigms” within the history of science, this book examines how different models of natural law were presented by Catholic theologians in order to offer more compelling and coherent understandings of what the natural law is, and how Catholic theology uses it. The author explores whether the application of Kuhn’s ideas to the heated Catholic debates over natural law might offer a more dispassionate way of understanding the development of a theological micro-tradition. The book argues that the micro-traditions of theology (most specifically the micro-tradition of natural law) do not build seamlessly on each other. The year 1968 is offered as the starting point for the narrative that follows because that was when, in the United States, the unquestioned dominance of the specific type of natural law discourse (neo-scholasticism) that had defined Catholic moral theology for generations came to a dramatic end with unnerving specificity.