Natural law

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Animal Behavior ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Social Perspective ◽  
Individual Agency ◽  
The Social ◽  
Do So ◽  
Scholastic Tradition

This chapter explores the concept of natural law, turning first to the Protestant milieu. Alterity—what would in the seventeenth century come to be theorized, and problematized, as “sociability”—is the dominant mood of the humanist and Protestant handling of natural law. It is there even in Thomas Hobbes, whose natural law coincides with moral philosophy and concerns the sphere of one's actions in respect of others. However, the Catholic scholastic tradition presents a very different framing of natural law, one that centers on individual agency and regulates the behavior of individual agents in their aspect as beings of a particular kind. While authors in this tradition grapple equally with the question of animal behavior in relation to law, they do not do so from the social perspective that characterizes Protestant humanist Aristotelians and jurists.

Early Calvinist Resistance Theory: New Perspectives on an Old Label

2007 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 309-319
Author(s):  
Glen Bowman
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Sixteenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Associate Professor ◽  
Christian Ethics ◽  
Systematic Theology ◽  
Resistance Theory

In the article The Use of Natural Law in Early Calvinist Resistance Theory, David VanDrunen, Robert B. Strimple Associate Professor of Systematic Theology and Christian Ethics at Westminster Seminary (California), analyzes natural law as it appeared in the writings of several sixteenth—century resistance theorists—John Knox, Christopher Goodman, John Ponet, Theodore Beza, Francois Hotman, and the unknown writer of Vindiciae contra Tyrannos. Van Drunen's article is much needed, since Richard Tuck, in his otherwise astute 1979 study on natural law, does not adequately address Reformation-era developments, focusing instead on Thomas Hobbes, Samuel Pufendorf, and other seventeenth-century theorists. Nevertheless, I take issue with Van Drunen's assertion that these writers were all “committed to the theology of Calvin” and were “early Calvinist resistance theorists.” One could make the case that most of these writers were, but there is one notable exception: English reformer, humanist, bishop, and polemicist John Ponet.

Power and Authority in Seventeenth Century England

1974 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Richard Tuck
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Law Of Nature ◽  
The People ◽  
The Law ◽  
Power And Authority

Many English political theorists of the mid-seventeenth century reveal in their writings an awareness that new political terminologies were needed to cope with the apparent breakdown of traditional ideologies. Such an insight is of course famously displayed by Thomas Hobbes and the early Hobbists such as Dudley Digges, in their treatment of orthodox Natural Law doctrines - ‘if we looke backe to the Law of Nature, we shall finde that the people would have had a clearer and more distinct notion of it, if common use of calling it Law had not helped to confound their understanding, when it ought to have been named the Right of nature’ wrote Digges in 1643.

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 Property beyond princely authority: the intellectual and legal roots of Ulrik Huber’s fundamental law

2016 ◽  
Vol 84 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 225-244
Author(s):  
Gustaaf van Nifterik
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Property Rights ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Common Law ◽  
Legal Context ◽  
Fundamental Law ◽  
Do So

In this paper I argue for a rule-of-law-reading of Ulrik Huber’s fundamental law on freedom of property. My aim is to show that there is enough contemporary intellectual and legal context for such a reading. I do so by arguing along three lines: the medieval tradition that rooted the origin of private property in natural law, protection of property in the constitution of Holland in the seventeenth century, and property rights protected by fundamental law in English common law.


From Hobbes to Shaftesbury

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher Brooke
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The Political

This chapter considers the seventeenth-century reception of Thomas Hobbes, and in particular the question of how he was understood as being both a funny (and dangerous) kind of Stoic and later as a funny (and dangerous) kind of Epicurean. It discusses how Hobbes came to be characterized as an Epicurean and how his critics responded to the political theory he had presented in Leviathan — particularly his arguments on natural law. The chapter focuses in particular on Anthony Ashley Cooper, Earl of Shaftesbury, whose philosophical sympathies led him to become an opponent of Hobbes and a supporter of the latitude-men or latitudinarians and their particular engagements with Stoicism.

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