Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Scottish Enlightenment in the history of ideas
- 1 Natural law in the seventeenth century
- 2 Natural law and moral realism: The civic humanist synthesis in Francis Hutcheson and George Turnbull
- 3 Between superstition and enthusiasm: David Hume's theory of justice, government, and politics
- 4 Adam Smith out of context: His theory of rights in Prussian perspective
- 5 John Millar and the science of a legislator
- 6 Thomas Reid's moral and political philosophy
- 7 Dugald Stewart and the science of a legislator
- 8 The science of a legislator in James Mackintosh's moral philosophy
- 9 James Mill and Scottish moral philosophy
- 10 From natural law to the rights of man: A European perspective on American debates
- Bibliography
- Index
1 - Natural law in the seventeenth century
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 June 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction: The Scottish Enlightenment in the history of ideas
- 1 Natural law in the seventeenth century
- 2 Natural law and moral realism: The civic humanist synthesis in Francis Hutcheson and George Turnbull
- 3 Between superstition and enthusiasm: David Hume's theory of justice, government, and politics
- 4 Adam Smith out of context: His theory of rights in Prussian perspective
- 5 John Millar and the science of a legislator
- 6 Thomas Reid's moral and political philosophy
- 7 Dugald Stewart and the science of a legislator
- 8 The science of a legislator in James Mackintosh's moral philosophy
- 9 James Mill and Scottish moral philosophy
- 10 From natural law to the rights of man: A European perspective on American debates
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
The attempt to understand morality in the legalistic terms of a natural law is ancient but is now mostly associated with the formulation given it by Thomas Aquinas in the late thirteenth century. Earlier natural law is commonly seen as leading up to Aquinas's paradigmatic version, whereas later natural law is understood as deriving from it. This approach has resulted in long-standing disputes about the status of Protestant natural law vis-à-vis Thomism, disputes generally centring on the question of the originality of Hugo Grotius, commonly considered ‘the father of modern natural law’. It is easy to understand why there should be such disagreements. The sources reveal an extraordinary degree of continuity between scholastic natural law (not only Aquinas's) and the natural law doctrines that dominated Protestant Europe during the seventeenth and much of the eighteenth centuries. Yet it seemed to moral philosophers of these centuries, especially to the modern natural lawyers themselves, that something decisively new happened with Grotius. Protestant natural law was seen as a distinct school of moral philosophy, until the history of philosophy was redrawn by Kant and by others working in the light of his philosophy.
The resolution of these disputes has in some measure been frustrated by the concentration on the role of Grotius. Although Grotius's underlying theory conveyed to Protestant Europe large parts of natural law material utilized by the great scholastic thinkers, especially those of sixteenth-century Spain, it contained elements that his successors considered dangerous.
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- Natural Law and Moral PhilosophyFrom Grotius to the Scottish Enlightenment, pp. 15 - 62Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1996
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