Adam Smith’s ‘Science of Human Nature’

2018 ◽  
pp. 364-384
Author(s):  
Christopher J. Berry
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Conception Of Man ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Programmatic Statement

There is no programmatic statement in Smith about the nature of human nature only, rather, a profuse scattering of remarks. However, it is clear that he shared the aspirations of the 'Enlightenment project', within which a self-awareness of a ‘conception of man’ was focal. There was a convergence on the idea that human nature is constant and uniform in its operating principles. By virtue of this constancy human nature was predictable so that once it was scientifically understood then, as Hume argued, a new foundation was possible for, inter alia, morals, criticism, politics and natural religion. While Smith is more circumspect he shares Hume’s ambitions for the “science of man”, which Smith calls the “science of human nature” and which he believes was, even in the seventeenth century, in its “infancy.” What Smith implies about this ‘science’ is explicated.

The investigator: on ‘life’ after death. Charles Lewinsky’s Andersen

2019 ◽  
pp. 216-225
Author(s):  
I. I. Reiderman
Keyword(s):  
Self Awareness ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Moral Self ◽  
Life After Death ◽  
Banality Of Evil ◽  
Human Type ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
The Subject

Devoted to Andersen, a novel by the Swiss-born writer Charles Lewinsky, the article sets out to interpret the book with a special emphasis on its protagonist, a Gestapo officer, whose image experiences a paradoxical reinvention in our time. In his analysis, the author is not limited to interpretation of the novel’s meanings. The article argues that Lewinsky’s novel explores contemporary cultural-philosophical problems: those of humanity in the postmodern situation. On the subject of the ‘banality of evil’ (using Hanna Arendt’s term), the author points out the severe estrangement of the main character’s consciousness, the existence devoid of life, substituted with insensitive functioning. The paper emphasizes that while the human type described in the novel formally conforms to ‘the Enlightenment project’, it demonstrates an egregious lack of moral self-awareness. The author refers to such a description as typical for a ‘hero of our time’ in the 21st c. and, therefore, problematizes the cultural-philosophical discourses invoked by Lewinsky in his book.

The Enlightenment Turns to China: The International Flow of Concepts and Their Geographic Dispersion

Cultura ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 31-52
Author(s):  
Chien-shou CHEN
Keyword(s):  
Joint Production ◽  
Chinese History ◽  
Conceptual History ◽  
International Flow ◽  
Geographic Dispersion ◽  
Production Of Knowledge ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Modern Chinese History ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
History Of

Abstract This article attempts to strip away the Eurocentrism of the Enlightenment, to reconsider how this concept that originated in Europe was transmitted to China. This is thus an attempt to treat the Enlightenment in terms of its global, worldwide significance. Coming from this perspective, the Enlightenment can be viewed as a history of the exchange and interweaving of concepts, a history of translation and quotation, and thus a history of the joint production of knowledge. We must reconsider the dimensions of both time and space in examining the global Enlightenment project. As a concept, the Enlightenment for the most part has been molded by historical actors acting in local circumstances. It is not a concept shaped and brought into being solely from textual sources originating in Europe. As a concept, the Enlightenment enabled historical actors in specific localities to begin to engage in globalized thinking, and to find a place for their individual circumstances within the global setting. This article follows such a line of thought, to discuss the conceptual history of the Enlightenment in China, giving special emphasis to the processes of formation and translation of this concept within the overall flow of modern Chinese history.

Biblical Philology and Hermeneutical Debate in the Dutch Republic in the Second Half of the Seventeenth Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jetze Touber
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Human Dignity ◽  
Dutch Republic ◽  
Biblical Scholarship ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Conflicting Interests ◽  
The Ideal ◽  
Held Back

Spinoza’s time was rife with conflicts. Historians tend to structure these by grouping two opposing forces: progressive Cartesio-Cocceian-liberals versus conservative Aristotelian-Voetian-Orangists. Moderately enlightened progressives, so the story goes, endorsed notions such as human dignity, toleration, freedom of opinion, but shied away from radicalism, held back by the conservative counterforce. Yet the drift was supposed to be inevitably towards the Enlightenment. This chapter tries to capture theological conflicts in the Dutch Republic of the Early Enlightenment in a triangular scheme, that covers a wider range of conflicting interests. Its corners are constituted by ‘dogmatism’ (Dordrecht orthodoxy), ‘scripturalism’ (Cocceianism), and ‘rationalism’ (theology inspired by Cartesianism, Spinozism, or any other brand of new philosophy). Dogmatics and rationalists battled in terms of philosophy, whereas the scripturalists and their respective opponents fought each other rather in the field of biblical scholarship. This multilateral conflict within Dutch Calvinism made the ideal of a unified church untenable.

Naturalizing Sharīʿa: Foundationalist Ambiguities in Modern Islamic Apologetics

2015 ◽  
Vol 22 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 45-81 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrew F. March
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Natural Law ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Close Reading ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Ethical Systems

This essay discusses an important feature of much modern Islamic writing on law, politics and morality. The feature in question is the claim that Islamic law and human nature (fiṭra) are in perfect harmony, that Islam is the “natural religion” (dīn al-fiṭra), and thus that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. My discussion proceeds through a close reading of the Moroccan independence leader and religious scholar ʿAllāl al-Fāsī (d. 1974). I discuss the ambiguities within Fāsī’s theory and suggest that the natural religion doctrine might be better understood less as a reduction of Islamic law to “natural law” and more as an apologetic effort to defend the realism and feasibility of Islamic law. In the hands of reformers like Fāsī, this project is beset with unresolved ambiguities around the constraining quality of revealed law in practice and the moral validity of non-Islamic political and ethical systems.


Die Legitimität der Aufklärung

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stefan Schick
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Cultural Differences ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Active Interest ◽  
Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi

This study defends the legitimacy of the Enlightenment project by way of its different realizations in the philosophies of Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi. Today, Enlightenment as a cosmopolitan project with a global claim is often considered synonymous with Western chauvinism. The assertion of a universally binding reason is all too obviously inconsistent with the much-cited recognition of cultural differences. In contrast, it is the conviction brought forward in this book that an adequately understood Enlightenment is an unconditional right of every person taking an active interest in a self-determined way of life. Only the realization of this conception of Enlightenment can provide the required space for the reciprocal recognition of human differences to freely unfold.

Quakers, Christ, and the Enlightenment

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Madeleine Pennington
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Religious Groups ◽  
Baruch Spinoza ◽  
Intellectual Engagement ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Intellectual Milieu ◽  
Henry More ◽  
Central Belief

The Quakers were by far the most successful of the radical religious groups to emerge from the turbulence of the mid-seventeenth century—and their survival into the present day was largely facilitated by the transformation of the movement during its first fifty years. What began as a loose network of charismatic travelling preachers was, by the start of the eighteenth century, a well-organized and international religious machine. This shift is usually explained in terms of a desire to avoid persecution, but Quakers, Christ and the Enlightenment argues instead for the importance of theological factors as the major impetus for change. In the first sustained account of the theological motivations guiding the development of seventeenth-century Quakerism, the volume explores the Quakers’ positive intellectual engagement with those outside the movement to offer a significant reassessment of the causal factors determining the development of early Quakerism. Tracing the Quakers’ engagement with such luminaries as Baruch Spinoza, Henry More, John Locke, and John Norris, the volume unveils the Quakers’ concerted attempts to bolster their theological reputation through the refinement of their central belief in the ‘inward Christ’, or ‘the Light within’. In doing so, the study challenges persistent stereotypes of early modern radicalism as anti-intellectual and ill-educated—and indeed, as defined either by ‘rationalist’ or ‘spiritualist’ excess. Rather, the theological concerns of the Quakers and their interlocutors point to a crisis of Christology weaving through the intellectual milieu of the seventeenth century, which has long been underestimated as significant fuel for the emerging Enlightenment

Where Does Niklas Luhmann’s Card Index Come From?

2018 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 390-420 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alberto Cevolini
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Management ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
Main Hypothesis ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Filing Cabinet ◽  
The Social ◽  
Enlightenment Project ◽  
Card Index ◽  
Social Use ◽  
The Mind

Thanks to a grant of the Nordrhein-Westfälische Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Künste, Bielefeld University has started a fifteen-year project (2015–2030) that includes the production of a critical edition of Niklas Luhmann’s extant works and manuscripts, as well as the digitalization of his famous card index. This valuable enterprise has rekindled interest in what many scholars hold to be a ‘holy grail’: a marvelous instrument that aided great creativity and scientific production by the German sociologist. Indeed, people feel that looking inside the filing cabinet is like looking inside the mind of a genius at work. This article suggests a different point of view, rooted in the Enlightenment project of the sociologist of Bielefeld. The main hypothesis is that in the use of a card index as a surprise generator, there is nothing particularly surprising if one considers the evolution of knowledge management in early modern Europe. Rather, the question should be: how it is possible to explain the evolutionary improbability of the social use of ‘machines’ as secondary memories for knowledge management and reproduction? This article provides some suggestions for research and tries to determine where Luhmann’s card index comes from.

scholarly journals The Problem of Individualization in Revealing Humanistic Anthropocentrism of the Renaissance

2020 ◽  
pp. 212-220
Author(s):  
Pavlo PYLYPYSHYN
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Middle Ages ◽  
Interpersonal Relationships ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Free Market ◽  
World Order ◽  
Legal Aspects ◽  
Self Awareness ◽  
Individual Values ◽  
Self Knowledge

It has been proved that after the Middle Ages a new philosophical and legal worldview started to shape, which ensured a significant development of the philosophy of law that enabled emerging individualism. In the philosophy of the Renaissance, the problem of individualism changed its vector from the objective world to all spheres of social life that led to a rise of individual consciousness, causing human’s discovery of itself as a subject of activity. It has been established that the changes also occurred in the type of thinking that moved from collectivist to new thinking focused on defending dignity, the value of an individual, showing interest to interpersonal relationships, respect to individual sense of being, increasing attention to the process of self-knowledge, awareness of individual notion of oneself. It has been proved that the Renaissance relieved a human from external authorities and gave him a space of freedom, in which new notions of human’s place in the world appeared: the role of the state in organizing public life, the importance of social and individual values in taking significant decisions. It has been found out that the reasons that contributed to the emergence of a new individualism in the Renaissance era, in our opinion, include: the replacement of Christian theocentrism with humanistic anthropocentrism; integration of aesthetic and moral ideas taken from the ancient world order; the exit of individual freedom of the subjective «I» from the category of universal, denying the fundamental foundations of the latter; growth of intellectual movement; formation of new economic relations based on the freedom of economic entities; growth of free market economy, raising the prestige of educated people; proclamation of the right to individual initiative, self-awareness; the rise of individual religious consciousness; affirmation of the priority of human nature over the immanent reality; human’s discovery of itself as a subject of activity and law; fast growth of interest to self-knowledge, awareness of individual notion of oneself, transformation of a view of human nature and its relationship with the social and legal aspects of life, significance if internal motifs of individual actions as part of social and legal evaluation of an individual, focusing on humanism. Keywords: individualism, individualization, individuality, personality, individual, Renaissance, freedom.

scholarly journals Исторический процесс в свете христианской антропологии Ф. М. Достоевского

2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (18) ◽  
Author(s):  
Boris Nikolaievitch Tarassov
Keyword(s):  
Human Nature ◽  
Social Systems ◽  
Field Of View ◽  
Christian Realism ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Moral World ◽  
The Law ◽  
The One

Based on the fundamental concepts of the "mystery of man" and Christian realism, the "law of the Ego" and the "law of love" for Dostoevsky's creative consciousness, the article examines the one-sidedness of biologizing and socializing concepts of human nature since the Enlightenment and their connection with entropic processes in the spiritual and moral world of people and declining trends in the course of history. It is shown how the spiritual laws of life, which are leaving the field of view of rationalistic and pragmatic consciousness, transform social-progressive design and planning, and introduce nihilistic elements into them. It is emphasized that the methodology of Christian realism is universal, that it connects the "mystery of man" with the mystery of history, and becomes one of the main principles for assessing the hierarchy of values in various ideological and social systems.

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