Paley, William (1743–1805)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte R. Brown
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Orthodox Christianity ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
God's Will ◽  
William Paley

William Paley, theologian and moral philosopher, expressed and codified the views and arguments of orthodox Christianity and the conservative moral and political thought of eighteenth-century England. Paley says that his works form a unified system based on natural religion. Like others during this period, Paley thought that reason alone, unaided by revelation, would establish many Christian theses. He is confident that a scientific understanding of nature will support the claim that God is the author of nature. Paley belongs to the anti-deist tradition that holds that revelation supplements natural religion. The most important revelation is God’s assurance of an afterlife in which the virtuous are rewarded and the vicious are punished. Natural and revealed religion, in turn, provide the foundation for morality. God’s will determines what is right and his power to reward and punish us in the afterlife provide the moral sanctions. On the whole, Paley is concerned with sustaining Christian faith, and ensuring that people known what their duties are and do them.

Butler, Joseph (1692–1752)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
R.G. Frey
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Human Nature ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Moral Motivation ◽  
Moral Philosopher ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
The Third ◽  
Long Line ◽  
Joseph Butler ◽  
The One

Joseph Butler the moral philosopher is in that long line of eighteenth-century thinkers who sought to answer Thomas Hobbes on human nature and moral motivation. Following the Third Earl of Shaftesbury, he rejects any purely egoistic conception of these. Instead, he analyses human nature into parts, of which he notices in detail appetites, affections, and passions on the one hand and the principles of self-love, benevolence and conscience on the other. His ethics consists in the main in showing the relation of these parts to each other. They form a hierarchy, ordered in terms of their natural authority, and while such authority can be usurped, as when the particular passions overwhelm self-love and conscience, the system that they constitute, or human nature, is rightly proportioned when each part occupies its rightful place in the ordered hierarchy. Virtue consists in acting in accordance with that ordered, rightly proportioned nature. As a philosopher of religion, Butler addresses himself critically to the eighteenth-century flowering of deism in Britain. On the whole, the deists allowed that God the Creator existed but rejected the doctrines of natural and, especially, revealed religion. Butler’s central tactic against them is to argue, first, that the central theses associated with natural religion, such as a future life, are probable; and second, that the central theses associated with revealed religion, such as miracles, are as probable as those of natural religion. Much turns, therefore, on the success of Butler’s case in appealing to what is present in this world as evidence for a future life.

Nicolas Gueudeville's Enlightenment Utopia

Moreana ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 55 (Number 209) (1) ◽  
pp. 24-60
Author(s):  
Russ Leo
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
Political Anthropology ◽  
French Translation ◽  
Natural Religion ◽  
Original Length ◽  
English Law

Nicolas Gueudeville's 1715 French translation of Utopia is often dismissed as a “belle infidèle,” an elegant but unfaithful work of translation. Gueudeville does indeed expand the text to nearly twice its original length. But he presents Utopia as a contribution to emergent debates on tolerance, natural religion, and political anthropology, directly addressing the concerns of many early advocates of the ideas we associate with Enlightenment. In this sense, it is not as much an “unfaithful” presentation of More's project as it is an attempt to introduce Utopia to eighteenth-century francophone audiences—readers for whom theses on political economy and natural religion were much more salient than More's own preoccupations with rhetoric and English law. This paper introduces Gueudeville and his oeuvre, paying particular attention to his revisions to Louis-Armand de Lom d'Arce, Baron de Lahontan's 1703 Nouveaux Voyages dans l'Amérique Septentrionale. Published in 1705, Gueudeville's “revised, corrected, & augmented” version of Lahontan's Voyages foregrounds the rational and natural religion of the Huron as well as their constitutive aversion to property, to concepts of “mine” and “yours.” Gueudeville's revised version of Lahontan's Voyages purports to be an anthropological investigation as well as a study of New World political economy; it looks forward, moreover, to his edition of Utopia, framing More's work as a comparable study of political economy and anthropology. Gueudeville, in other words, renders More's Utopia legible to Enlightenment audiences, depicting Utopia not in terms of impossibility and irony but rather as a study of natural religion and attendant forms of political, devotional, and economic life. Gueudeville's edition of Utopia even proved controversial due, in part, to his insistence on the rationality as well as the possibility of Utopia.

Life and Death

2016 ◽  
pp. 422-442
Author(s):  
Jana Bennett
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Scientific Understanding ◽  
Human Condition ◽  
Christian Faith ◽  
Artificial Reproduction ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
Salvation History ◽  
The Creation

This chapter places Catholic teaching on questions of life and death against the background of a Catholic vision of salvation history, emphasizing that Catholics see no necessary opposition between Christian faith and progress in scientific understanding of the creation. The chapter then considers questions concerning abortion, contraception, and techniques for artificial reproduction. The second half of the chapter focuses on questions concerning death. Catholic teaching views human life in this world as finite, and thus sees death as intrinsic to the current human condition. After considering Catholic teaching on euthanasia, the chapter considers Catholic discussion of war, the death penalty, and care for the environment.

The Taming of God: Revealed Religion and Natural Religion in the Eighteenth-Century Harvard Dudleian Lectures

2010 ◽  
Vol 83 (4) ◽  
pp. 641-673 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Jeehoon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Religious Leaders ◽  
Harvard College ◽  
Natural Religion

In the mid–1700s, America's religious leaders feared deism, but by the early 1800s, it had faded from view. The death of its leaders and the rise of pietistic Christianity have been charged with its downfall. At one of its purported hotbeds—Harvard College—another possibility emerges: deism disappeared because, at least in some crucial arenas, it had triumphed, and thus deists were appeased.

Calvinists, Arminians, Socinians: Popular Sovereignty and Natural Rights in Early Modern Political Thought

2019 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
James Moore
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
John Locke ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Reformed Church ◽  
Hugo Grotius

This chapter focuses upon natural rights in the writings of Hugo Grotius, the Levellers and John Locke and the manner in which their understanding of rights was informed by distinctive Protestant theologies: by Arminianism or the theology of the Remonstrant Church and by Socinianism. The chapter argues that their theological principles and the natural rights theories that followed from those principles were in conflict with the theology of Calvin and the theologians of the Reformed church. The political theory that marks the distinctive contribution of Calvin and the Reformed to political theory was the idea of popular sovereignty, an idea revived in the eighteenth century, in the political writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

3. The history of political thought and Marxism

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-50
Author(s):  
Richard Whatmore
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Karl Marx ◽  
Historical Materialism ◽  
History Of Political Thought ◽  
Scientific Philosophy ◽  
History Of ◽  
Friedrich Engels

‘The history of political thought and Marxism’ focuses on Marxism, which became the most global and scientific philosophy in the twentieth century. An important figure here is Karl Marx, the outcast from Prussian Trier that famously contributed to the science of historical materialism. Marx’s The Condition of the Working Class in England justified revolution through a philosophy that emerged from reading European history. Marx, along with Friedrich Engels, accepted that the progress of commerce by the end of the eighteenth century made European states more powerful than others in history. Marx’s contemporaries believed that the study of societies in every stage of history is vital in understanding the future.

The Personnel of the Dublin Society of United Irishmen, 1791-4

1940 ◽  
Vol 2 (5) ◽  
pp. 12-53
Author(s):  
R. B. McDowell
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Opinion ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Power ◽  
Political Freedom ◽  
Political Life ◽  
Independent Voters ◽  
United Irishmen

One of the most noticeable features of Irish political life in the 'later eighteenth century, is, that though political power was :oncentrated in comparatively few hands, there was a very large leasure of political freedom. One could in fact sum up the system by saying that it was oligarchy tempered by discussion. As a result, voluntary and unofficial societies and clubs arose for the purpose of educating and influencing public opinion, and were the nuclei of much political thought and action. There [were Whig Clubs, Constitutional Clubs, Societies for the [Preservation of Liberty and Peace and Associations of Independent Voters. Thus there was nothing very strange in the Iformation, in November 1791, of a Dublin branch of the newly bounded Society of United Irishmen. But this group was to prove unique in at least one respect.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document