Conscience and reason: the natural law theory of Jean Barbeyrac

1993 ◽  
Vol 36 (2) ◽  
pp. 289-308 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Hochstrasser
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Original Equation ◽  
General Development ◽  
Independent Contribution ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Civil Authority

ABSTRACTJean Barbeyrac is best known as the leading eighteenth-century translator in French of the major writings on natural law by Pufendorf, Grotius and Cumberland. This article attempts to expound and assess Barbeyrac's independent contribution to the natural law tradition as it may be recovered both from these editions of the works of others and also from other writings. It is argued that Barbeyrac's intellectual context in the Huguenot diaspora and his distinctive reading of Locke, Bayle, and Pufendorf led him to develop an original equation of the authority of conscience with the authority of reason. The rationalist natural law theory he developed inevitably identified the role assigned to God within it and the scope of resistance to legal civil authority as central issues for debate which remained problematic for Barbeyrac throughout his career. These important ethical subjects remained unresolved in the general development of natural jurisprudence in the early eighteenth century, as exemplified in Barbeyrac's attempt to refute Leibniz's telling critique of Pufendorf.

Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s Democratization of Moral Virtue

2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-97
Author(s):  
Getty L. Lustila
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Moral Virtue ◽  
Moral Character ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
Modern Moral Philosophy

AbstractThis paper examines Catharine Trotter Cockburn’s moral philosophy, focusing on her accounts of virtuous conduct, conscience, obligation, and moral character. I argue that Cockburn’s account of virtue has two interlocking parts: a view of what virtue requires of us, and a view of how we come to see this requirement as authoritative. I then argue that while the two parts are ultimately in tension with one another, the tension is instructive. I use Cockburn’s encounter with Shaftesbury’s writings to help bring out this tension in her thought. I conclude that Cockburn’s work marks a bridge in modern moral philosophy from seventeenth-century natural law theory to the naturalism of the eighteenth century— that of Gay, Hume, and Bentham.

scholarly journals Leibniz and Descartes

2019 ◽  
pp. 720-737
Author(s):  
Jean-Pascal Anfray
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Philosophy Of Mind ◽  
Natural Philosophy ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Intellectual Context ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
The Law ◽  
Final Causes

This chapter examines Leibniz’s complex relations to Descartes. These relations are deeply influenced by the evolution of the intellectual context from the beginning of the 1670s to the early eighteenth century. Beyond Leibniz’s overall appraisal of Descartes’s philosophy, there are three areas that stand out in which the discussion and criticism of Descartes’s ideas played a decisive role in the development of Leibniz’s thought: epistemology, natural philosophy, and philosophy of mind. There are three central issues at stake between the two philosophers: the nature and role of evidence, the use of final causes, and the Law of Continuity.

Natural Law and Natural Rights in Early Enlightenment Copenhagen

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-124
Author(s):  
Mads Langballe Jensen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Common Ground ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Academic Teaching ◽  
Hugo Grotius ◽  
The Common ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century

This chapter discusses the earliest teaching of post-grotian natural law by Henrik Weghorst and Christian Reitzer in Copenhagen in the decades around 1700. This teaching has often been presented as merely derivative of the ideas of Hugo Grotius or Samuel Pufendorf. In contrast, this chapter argues that Weghorst and Reitzer developed two very different, and antagonistic, forms of natural law, reflecting academic teaching in Kiel and in Halle. However, it also shows how Weghorst and Reitzer illustrate the common ground of much Lutheran natural law theorising in the later seventeenth and early eighteenth century. Thus, for all their differences, both gave primacy to natural law and focused on duties, rather than rights, as constitutive of social and political life.

David Hume and the eighteenth-century conception of natural law

Legal Studies ◽  
1982 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 14-33 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Milton
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
David Hume ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Philosophical Thinking ◽  
Modern Writer ◽  
Natural Law Theory ◽  
John Finnis

Natural law is discussed by almost every modern writer on jurisprudence; but with a few exceptions - of which John Finnis' Natural Law and Natural Rights is the most substantial - the impression given is that it is of historical interest only, that it has in some way been discredited, or at least superseded, by legal positivism. The implicit idea - and here legal positivism borrows from Comte - is that natural law represented some earlier ‘metaphysical’ stage which was then followed by ‘scientific’ legal positivism. This account requires the existence of a natural law theory that dominated juristic and philosophical thinking until the eighteenth century, when it was overthrown by Hume and Bentham. Hume, the story goes, found the decisive argument against the natural law theory; while Bentham created the new theory oflegal positivism. The argument Hume discovered was that ought cannot be derived from is; and this, it is widely supposed, is fatal to all varieties of natural law.

The Rise of Natural Law in the Early Modern Period

2016 ◽  
pp. 624-641
Author(s):  
Robert von Friedeburg
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Early Modern Period ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Modern Period ◽  
The Reformation ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Will ◽  
Civil Authority

This article traces the history of the rise of natural law from the classical and medieval periods to the eighteenth century, considering the publications and debates that began to mushroom from the Reformation, and how the works of Grotius, Hobbes, Locke, and von Pufendorf transformed the political philosophy and learned architecture of Latin Europe. It examines how confessional revelation theology on the will of God, as revealed in scripture, was marginalized by jurists and philosophers and goes on to discuss the role of civil authority as obligating agency within each sovereign state; natural law’s emphasis on rights and obligations; and the arguments of Aristotle and Cicero. It explores three interrelated developments seen as responsible for the rise of natural law during the early modern period, and concludes with an analysis of its further development in relation to the philosophical scene and political environment in each polity during the eighteenth century.

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