METAPHYSICS AND MODERNITY: NATURAL LAW AND NATURAL RIGHTS IN GERSHOM CARMICHAEL AND FRANCIS HUTCHESON

2009 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
SAMUEL GREGG
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
Metaphysical Foundation

This paper argues that the founding fathers of the tradition of Scottish Enlightenment natural jurisprudence, Gersholm Carmichael (1672–1729) and Francis Hutcheson (1694–1746), articulated a view of rights that is pertinent to the contemporary dominance of the language of rights. Maintaining a metaphysical foundation for rights while drawing upon the early-modern Protestant natural law tradition, their conception of rights is more significantly indebted to the pre-modern scholastic natural law tradition than often realized. This is illustrated by exploring some of the background to their respective theories of rights, detailing the precise reasoning that Carmichael and Hutcheson brought to bear upon their conception of rights, and then exploring their application of their understanding of rights to the question of property.

Carmichael, Gershom (1672–1729)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Moore ◽  
Michael Silverthorne
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Great Britain ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Adam Smith ◽  
Natural Theology ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
Thomas Reid ◽  
Francis Hutcheson ◽  
The University

Gershom Carmichael was a teacher and writer of pivotal importance for the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century. He was the first Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow, predecessor of Francis Hutcheson, Adam Smith and Thomas Reid. Carmichael introduced the natural law tradition of Grotius, Pufendorf and Locke to the moral philosophy courses he taught at the University of Glasgow (1694–1729). His commentaries on Samuel Pufendorf’s work on the duty of man and citizen (1718 and 1724) made his teaching available to a wider readership in Great Britain and in Europe. He also composed an introduction to logic, Breviuscula Introductio ad Logicam, (1720 and 1722) and a brief system of natural theology, Synopsis Theologiae Naturalis (1729).

Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond

PMLA ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 132 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-50 ◽  
Author(s):  
Elizabeth B. Bearden
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Sign Language ◽  
Disability Studies ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Early Modern England ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Deaf People ◽  
Human Variation ◽  
Signed Languages ◽  
Universal Language

Disability studies scholars and Renaissance scholars have much to learn from early modern schemata of disability. Early modern people used nature and the natural to discriminate against and to include people with atypical bodies and minds. In his writings, the English physician John Bulwer (1606–56) considers Deafness a natural human variation with definite advantages, anticipating current concepts of biolinguistic diversity and Deaf-gain, while acknowledging his society's biases. He refutes the exclusion of sign language and other forms of what he calls “ocular audition” from natural law, which made capacity for speech the benchmark for natural rights. Instead of using Deaf people as exceptions that prove the rule of nature or as limit cases for humanity, Bulwer makes deafness part of a plastic understanding of the senses, and he promotes the sociability of signed languages as a conduit to a universal language that might be encouraged and taught in England.

scholarly journals Mundo da vida e Direito Natural. Uma Fundamentação Fenomenológica dos Direitos Humanos?

Phainomenon ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 22-23 (1) ◽  
pp. 441-454
Author(s):  
Ana Paula Loureiro de Sousa
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Phenomenological Description ◽  
Controversial Issue ◽  
Human Relationships ◽  
Modern Age

Abstract The justification of Natural Law is a very controversial issue, not only after the Positivist’s rebuttals, but since its very anthropological foundations in the early modern age. In this paper, I try do give an account of Natural Law and natural rights in terms of a phenomenological description of the background of normative intentionality. Taking a genetic stance, I go from the positive norm and the intentionality that constitutes it to the underling pregiveness that supplies the condition of its possibility. I exhibit it as the experience of the live-world, and I analyze it as an intersubjective world, where persons are given as equals and worth-counting. This is the very root of the concept of human dignity. Starting from it, I develop an account of the sense and content of the concept of Human Rights as a set of eidetic laws creating the framework for authentic human relationships.

Philosophy, Rights and Natural Law

2019 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Scottish Enlightenment ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
German Empire ◽  
Modern Natural ◽  
History Of ◽  
Institutional Contexts

Honouring the work of Knud Haakonssen, this book consists of a series of studies that investigate the place of early modern natural law in the history of political thought. These studies follow Haakonssen’s lead in treating natural law as central to the formulation of doctrines of obligations and rights in accordance with the interests of early modern polities and churches. In doing so, they approach natural law less as a unified doctrine and much more as a field of cross-cutting idioms in which competing political and juridical programs were prosecuted for a variety of purposes. The studies thus investigate how natural law doctrines were formulated, received, and put to work in a wide array of cultural, political and institutional contexts, ranging from the political thought of the Dutch Arminians, Locke’s struggle with the concept of religious toleration, the political-jurisprudential thought of Pufendorf, Thomasius and Wolff in the German Empire, and the jurisprudential thought of Hume and Smith in the context of the Scottish Enlightenment.

A Demonstrative Theory of Natural Law: Johannes Althusius and the Rise of Calvinist Jurisprudence

2009 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 248-265 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Witte
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legal Norms ◽  
Complex Theory ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
Law And Politics ◽  
Procedural Rights

Early modern Calvinists produced a rich tradition of natural law and natural rights thought that shaped the law and politics of protestant lands. The German-born Calvinist jurist Johannes Althusius produced one of the most original Calvinist natural law theories at the turn of the seventeenth century. Althusius argued for the natural qualities of a number of basic legal norms and practices by demonstrating their near universal embrace by classical and biblical, catholic and protestant, theological and legal communities alike. On this foundation, he developed a complex theory of public, private, penal and procedural rights and duties for his day, to be embraced by everyone, particularly by those who were slaughtering each other in religious wars, persecutions and inquisitions. Althusius' theory of natural law and natural rights was Calvinist in inspiration but universal in aspiration, and it anticipated the political formulations of a number of later Western writers, including Locke, Rousseau and Madison.1

scholarly journals Prawo naturalne w ramach radykalnego oświecenia

2020 ◽  
pp. 91-102
Author(s):  
Michał Wendland
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Social Practice ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Political Consequences ◽  
Radical Enlightenment ◽  
Traditional Natural ◽  
19Th And 20Th Century

The main difference between classical (both ancient and medieval) and modern concepts of natural law lies in the assumption of its supernatural (divine) foundation. Early modern philosophical concepts tend to undermine and gradually to deny God or some other metaphysical entity as the source of natural law. Some contemporary scholars (e.g. Habermas, Bobbio) define this process as transition (modernization, rationalization, Positivisierung) of traditional natural law towards the idea of natural rights and human rights. We can distinguish at least three main schools of natural law during the 17th and 18th centuries, each one more radical than the others: de Groot dares to consider the natural law “as if there were no God”. The philosophers of early Enlightenment (e.g. Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire) were perhaps more daring, nevertheless they were all deists and the “Supreme Being” still validates natural law in their writings. The article aims to examine the most radical view on natural law, i.e. partly forgotten and underestimated ideas of French materialists: La Mettrie, Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet. For they were all thinkers of the radical Enlightenment (J. Israel), all of them were materialists and atheists, and they perceived the nature and natural law as completely separated from God or other supernatural being. Unlike their older colleagues, these radical philosophers demanded equality (for women and ethnical minorities as well), emancipation, and social justice for all classes. This papers describes the idea of natural law within the radical Enlightenment movement,and investigates some political consequences of this interpretation during the French Revolution. While strongly materialistic, progressive, and atheist, the ideas of Diderot, Holbach, Mably, and Condorcet were also perceived as politically dangerous. All revolutionary attempts to put these ideas into political and social practice have failed. Finally, these ideas were refuted, but they returned during the 19th- and 20th-century debates on human rights.

Language Matters: ‘Counsel’ in Early Modern and Modern Medicine

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ian Sabroe ◽  
Phil Withington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Modern Medicine ◽  
Francis Bacon ◽  
Social Worlds ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Human Understanding ◽  
Successful Scientist

Francis Bacon is famous today as one of the founding fathers of the so-called ‘scientific revolution’ of the seventeenth century. Although not an especially successful scientist himself, he was nevertheless the most eloquent and influential spokesperson for an approach to knowledge that promised to transform human understanding of both humanity and its relationship with the natural and social worlds. The central features of this approach, as they emerged in Bacon’s own writings and the work of his protégés and associates after 1605, are equally well known. They include the importance of experiment, observation, and a sceptical attitude towards inherited wisdom (from the ‘ancients’ in general and Aristotle in particular).

Riccardo Saccenti, Debating Medieval Natural Law: A Survey. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2016, XIII, pp. 155.

Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 318-320
Author(s):  
Scott L. Taylor
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Legal Positivism ◽  
Great Chain Of Being ◽  
History Of ◽  
History Of Concepts ◽  
Hans Kelsen ◽  
University Of Notre Dame ◽  
Conceptual Shift

Saccenti’s volume belongs to the category of Begriffsgeschichte, the history of concepts, and more particularly to the debate over the existence or nonexistence of a conceptual shift in ius naturale to encompass a subjective notion of natural rights. The author argues that this issue became particularly relevant in mid-twentieth century, first, because of the desire to delimit the totalitarian implications of legal positivism chez Hans Kelsen; second, in response to Lovejoy’s The Great Chain of Being and its progeny; and third, as a result of a revival of neo-Thomistic and neo-scholastic perspectives sometimes labelled “une nouvelle chrétienté.”

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document