scholarly journals Trzy „odczarowania” nowożytnej koncepcji prawa naturalnego

2020 ◽  
Vol 6(161) ◽  
pp. 169-187
Author(s):  
Michał Wendland

he article addresses, in the perspective of the history of modern philosophy, the issue of the transformation to which the concept of natural law was subject in the 17th and 18th centuries. The author shares the views of, among others, Habermas and Bobbio, according to which the modern concept of natural law has been made “more positive” or “disenchanted” (after Weber), and thus the traditionally understood law of nature was transformed into the concept of natural rights. The article distinguishes three forms of this process: the first one, i.e., the so-called bourgeois school of natural law (Grotius, Thomasius, Pufendorf); the second one, developed by representatives of the early (moderate) Enlightenment (Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu); the third one, the most radical one, represented by the thinkers the late Enlightenment, mainly French encyclopaedists and materialists (La Mettrie, Holbach, Condorcet, Paine). Their common feature was the gradual abandonment of the metaphysical or theological foundations of natural law in favour of a naturalised ethic.

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-29
Author(s):  
Ivana Knežić

Aim: The paper aims at highlighting philosophical roots of the relation issue between nature and education in the process of socialization. Method: For the purpose of the research critical philosophical analysis and comparison of Thomas Hobbes’ and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s texts has been used. Concept: The first part of the paper clarifies the concept of nature and explains changes in understanding of this concept thorough the history of philosophy, with the special emphasis on transformation that happened in transition from medieval to modern period. Since both Hobbes and Rousseau are representatives of modern philosophy, the second section of the paper shows how modern concept of nature manifests in the works of the two philosophers and compares, in a more detailed way, their understanding of human nature or natural state of mankind, focusing on comparison of their concepts of human natural unsociability. The third part examines more closely the role of education in transformation of human individuals into social beings. Results: Research shows that, for the two philosophers, the role of education in the process of socialization consists in denaturalization of human beings. Conclusion: Hobbes’ and Rousseau’s idea of the relation of education and nature in the process of socialization constitutes a basis for justification of manipulations of education for political ends. To avoid such manipulations and find the adequate concept of education, paper suggests to search for the adequate concept of human nature first.      Key Words: education, human nature, sociability, Thomas Hobbes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau.


Mediaevistik ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 31 (1) ◽  
pp. 318-320
Author(s):  
Scott L. Taylor

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.”


2014 ◽  
Vol 40 (127) ◽  
pp. 173
Author(s):  
Lorenz B. Puntel

A palavra ‘metafísica’ na filosofia contemporânea tem um uso equívoco, mais exatamente: caótico. Em consequência disso, usos derivados como ‘não-metafísico’, ‘antimetafísco’ e ‘pós-metafísico’ não têm um sentido claro. O presente artigo não intenciona criar clareza sobre esta situação complicada. Com vista à sua finalidade, ele só focaliza o sentido que Habermas confere à palavra ‘metafísica’ e ao seu pensamento, ao qualificá-lo como ‘pós-metafísico’. O artigo mostra que Habermas essencialmente identifica metafísica com a filosofia moderna da subjetividade e da consciência, tanto na perspectiva transcendental como na perspectiva do idealismo alemão absoluto. Assim, a palavra ‘pós-metafísico’, aplicada a Habermas, significa o que está além da metafísica, como esta é entendida por ele; não pode significar o que, na longa história da filosofia, foi chamado de “metafísica”. O artigo primeiramente investiga e critica detalhadamente os dois caminhos seguidos por Habermas para chegar à sua postura pós-metafísica. O primeiro é um enfoque histórico-filosófico que faz certa violência aos autores interpretados e que conduz Habermas à conclusão que o pensamento metafísico é claramente obsoleto. Este enfoque, repetidamente por ele exposto, parte sempre de Kant e tem como seu ponto de chegada a postura filosófica de Habermas mesmo. O outro enfoque tem um caráter temático baseado em duas assunções fundamentais e de grande alcance. Segundo a primeira assunção, de caráter metodológico, a razão e a racionalidade são entendidas e aplicadas com um sentido puramente e estritamente procedural (razão/ racionalidade comunicativa). A segunda assunção, relativa ao conteúdo, estatui que o único objeto temático apropriado da filosofia é a dimensão da interacão entre sujeitos humanos ou seja da práctica social ou comunicativa própria do mundo-da-vida. A mais importante secção do artigo, a secção 3, apresenta uma crítica mais pormenorizada do pensamento pós-metafísico de Habermas. Nela se investigam três temas centrais da filosofia habermasiana e se evidenciam três falhas fundamentais da sua postura pós-metafísica. O artigo mostra que se trata de posicionamentos ou temas filosóficos, para os quais Habermas, devido à sua posição pós-metafísica, não está capacitado a elaborar uma solução esclarecedora. O primeiro posicionamento ou tema é a não-elaboração de um conceito de Mundo (com “M” maiúsculo) como a dimensão que unifica e possibilita a relação entre a dimensão da verdade e a dimensão do mundo-como-a-totalidade-dosobjetos. O segundo posicionamento ou tema é o naturalismo fraco” defendido por Habermas em base de uma distinção não-esclarecida entre o “mundo natural” e o “mundo-da-vida”. O terceiro tema ou posicionamento, ao qual Habermas se tem dedicado especialmente nos últimos anos, é a conjunção ou conexão ambígua e obscura entre a rejeição incondicional da metafísica e a (re)avaliação da religião. Estes três temas ou posicionamentos constituem três dicotomias que permanecem sem esclarecimento no pensamento do filósofo alemão. Uma tentativa de esclarecê-las consistiria em elaborar um conceito irrestrito de razão ou racionalidade e de teoria e de tematizar um conceito de Mundo como a dimensão que abarca os dois polos de cada uma das dicotomias. A execução desta tarefa teria como resultado uma teoria, à qual, em termos tradicionais, se deveria atribuir um estatuto metafísico.Abstract: The term ‘metaphysics’ is used in contemporary philosophy equivocally or, more precisely, chaotically. As a consequence, uses of such derivative terms as Anonmetaphysical”, “antimetaphysical” and “postmetaphysical” are also chaotic. This paper makes no attempt to bring order to this chaos. Its focus is only on Habermas’s understanding of metaphysics and of his own thinking as postmetaphysical, in his sense. It shows that he often comes close to identifying metaphysics with the modern philosophy of subjectivity or consciousness. This makes clear that the term “postmetaphysical,” as Habermas uses it, means only, “beyond what Habermas calls ‘metaphysics’”— hence, most importantly, “beyond Kantian and post-Kantian philosophies of subjectivity.” It cannot mean, “beyond everything that, in the history of philosophy, has been called ‘metaphysics.’” The paper first examines and criticizes in detail Habermas’s two ways of arriving at and characterizing and explaining his postmetaphysical position. The historico-philosophical path takes the form of severely truncated considerations of the history of philosophy that lead him to conclude that metaphysical thinking is utterly obsolete; these considerations almost always begin with Kant and end with Habermas himself. The thematic path consists of two fundamental and far-reaching assumptions. According to his methodological assumption, reason and/ or rationality has a purely procedural character. His contentual assumption is that the dimension of social interaction and communicative practices, the human lifeworld, is the only real subject matter for philosophy. Section 3, the most important section of the paper, presents more narrowly focused critiques of Habermas’s postmetaphysical thinking. It addresses three central problems in his philosophy, and reveals highly significant shortcomings of his postmetaphysical philosophical position. It shows extensively that his treatments of these problems put him on paths that he cannot follow to their ends because of the narrow limits of his postmetaphysical approach. The first problem is the lack of a concept of World (with a capital “W”) as the unity of the dimension of truth and the dimension of world-as-the-totality-of-objects43.3.2.3 The missing concept of World (capital-W)) as the unity of truth dimension and world-as-the-totalityof-objects; the second problem is his weak naturalism and his unclarified distinction between the natural world and the lifeworld; the third problem is his ambiguous and incoherent conjunction of the rejection of metaphysics and the (re)evaluation of religion. These three problems involve dichotomies Habermas leaves unexplained. Explaining them would require him to elaborate non-restricted concepts of reason/rationality and theory, and to thematize the World, i.e., the dimension encompassing both poles of the dichotomies. Such elaboration and thematization would yield a theory that would be, in traditional terms, metaphysical.


2021 ◽  
pp. 222-250
Author(s):  
Stuart Banner

This chapter examines the status of natural law in the legal system over the past century. In law schools, natural law never ceased to be a topic of study. This academic interest in natural law has had almost no effect on the working legal system, where natural law has been relied upon by only the most idiosyncratic of judges and lawyers. The history of our use of natural law has nevertheless continued to exert influence on the legal system, which still contains doctrines and practices that were once based on the law of nature.


1971 ◽  
Vol 15 (2) ◽  
pp. 213-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
D. O. Aihe

The rights of the individual in the society have been conceived as natural rights—which in the modern state have no more than a moral force. In the context of a modern state which asserts absolute powers within its borders, it appears idle to suggest as in the traditional natural law theories that there is anything like a law of nature existing independently of and overriding positive law.


2021 ◽  
pp. 137-186
Author(s):  
Michael C. Hawley

This chapter considers how John Locke reunites the two strands of Ciceronian thought from the seventeenth century. Locke returns to Cicero’s original formulation of natural law republicanism and innovates on it. He derives from Cicero’s natural law a set of natural rights, corresponding to the duties Cicero claimed were imposed by natural law. Locke’s law of nature is a barely modified version of Ciceronian natural law, but his conception of natural rights allows him to solve a number of theoretical problems posed by Cicero’s construal of the issue. Locke also offers a solution to the puzzle of how a doctrine of natural law could meet the standard of skeptical epistemology.


1926 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 524-547
Author(s):  
B. F. Wright

When James Otis in 1764 declared that government “has an everlasting foundation in the unchangeable will of God, the author of nature, whose laws never vary,” and that “there can be no prescription old enough to supersede the law of nature and the grant of God Almighty, who has given to all men a natural right to be free,” he was at once making use of one of the oldest and most important conceptions in the history of political thought and giving to that concept a distinctly American meaning. His was merely one of the earliest examples in this country of a kind of political theory which was to find reflection in the Declaration of Independence in one generation, in the higher law doctrine in another, and in a famous trilogy of decisions of the Supreme Court in still a third. However, the natural-rights theory is by no means the only usage found for the natural-law concept in the political thought of this country, and it is the purpose of this paper to trace briefly the various interpretations placed upon it and the different forms through which it has passed.It is easy enough to say that natural law has meant just what the individual theorist desired to have it mean; for its content has varied from philosophical anarchy to paternalistic aristocracy, and from the assertion of strongly individualistic democracy to the defence of highly centralized government. But this statement does not dispose of the problem. It is necessary to know why and when these varying interpretations were advanced and what their exponents meant when they spoke so confidently of the laws of nature.


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