(Source: Wiki)
Via intellectualhistory.net,
we learned of a conference on late natural law thinkers in Germany and
Scotland.
By the middle of
the eighteenth century, a number of authors who taught and wrote about natural
law saw themselves as being engaged in a very different intellectual and
academic activity than that of the natural lawyers of earlier generations.
While staying within the mode of natural law, the deep-going revision that they
understood themselves to be undertaking – each in their separate way – was to
shift the idea of natural law as something that human nature needed somehow to
have imposed upon it to the idea of natural law as in some sense inherent in
human nature itself. Furthermore, they saw the relevant aspects of human nature
to be the emotions or passions that drove people in their active lives. This
development in natural law thinking has been referred to as an anthropological
approach, as a turn from law to moral philosophy, as the formulation of a
‘Recht des Gefühls’, as a sentimental natural law, etc.
It was a line of
argument that took several different forms and was articulated in quite
different contexts, yet it is recognizable in thinkers as different as Johann
Jacob Schmauss in Göttingen and Adam Smith in Glasgow. It was, however, a
development that had started much earlier as part of the intense debates at the
turn of the century about the nature and validity of Samuel Pufendorf’s natural
law. Philosophers, legal theorists and theologians associated with the new
university in Halle were the leading disputants, and a particularly important
turning point in the debates about Pufendorf was Christian Thomasius’
abnegation during the early years of the new century of the deeply Pufendorfian
ideas of natural law that he had been propagating with great impact previously.
Only a few years
later, we see a reaction against Pufendorf in Scotland that has a number of
strikingly similar features to that in Germany. Here the leading figure was
Francis Hutcheson who had a broad influence on the intellectual culture that we
now refer to as the Scottish Enlightenment and among whose students was Adam
Smith. Across deep differences in philosophical, theological, legal and
political contexts in Germany and Scotland the similarities in thoughts about
natural law are striking, not only because of the idea of the passionate
foundations for natural law, but also because these ideas in both cultural
spheres led to some of the sharpest formulations of rights theories and to a
historicisation of morality and law that pointed towards the dissolution of the
natural law language. While acknowledging the many differences between the
German and the Scottish thinkers, similarities such as these are so intriguing
that they warrant joint consideration in a conference.
Programme
organisers: Frank Grunert (Halle); Knud Haakonssen (St. Andrews/Erfurt)
Local
organisers: James Harris and Richard Whatmore (St. Andrews)
(Source: intellectualhistory.net)
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