The invention of human nature: the intention and reception of Pufendorf's entia moralia doctrine. Issue 7 (3rd October 2019)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Authors: Hunter, Ian
• Is Part Of: History of European ideas. Volume 45:Issue 7(2019)
• Page Start: 933
• Page End: 952
• Publication Date: 2019-10-03
• Subjects: Pufendorf -- Natural law -- Moral entities -- Thomasius -- Schmauss -- Becmann -- Hertius; Europe -- Intellectual life -- Periodicals; Europe -- History -- Periodicals; 190.5
• DOI: 10.1080/01916599.2019.1614813
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 0191-6599

Abstract

ABSTRACT: In treating human nature as a 'moral entity', imposed by God for reasons into which man could have no direct insight, Samuel Pufendorf reconfigured the architecture of natural law thought in a fundamental way. For this meant that rather than deducing norms from a nature in which they had been embedded by God and could be discerned by self-reflective reason, man had to derive them by observing the requirements of the exigent condition in which he happened to find himself; and it further meant that such observation would be gathered via erudite citation of humanist authorities, rather than from philosophical reflection or introspection. As a result of this reconstruction, Pufendorfian natural law was opened to the normative structure of historically existing juridical-constitutional orders, for which it supplied both a propaedeutic and an abstract rationale. At the same time, however, theological and philosophical forms of natural law, based on normative moral anthropologies, continued unabated, this giving rise to a partitioning of the field into an introspective philosophy of law, and an observational legal humanism.