Utility contra utilitarianism: Holbach’s international ethics

Holbach is a largely forgotten figure of the history of ideas. Yet his work was influential on a number of historical thinkers, notably Marx. Famous for his materialistic atheism, Holbach has much to contribute to other fields, and this article details his contribution to international ethics, as well as its applicability in contemporary debates. By reviving his utilitarian theory, this article seeks to rehabilitate a subtle understanding of this ethical theory and contribute to a growing literature on eighteenth-century utilitarian thought and its applicability to contemporary international relations. This article introduces the utilitarian theory of Holbach, detailing the role that virtue ethics plays within it and showing the relative contribution of Holbach to utilitarian debates, notably against the thought of Bentham. Lastly, it applies Holbach’s complex conception of self-interest to the field of international ethics, showing the challenges he raises to realist and liberal theories of international relations, as well as the normative theories of Walzer and Rawls

Introduction: Debates on Experience and Empiricism in Nineteenth Century France

The lasting effects of the debate over canon-formation during the 1980s affected the whole field of Humanities, which became increasingly engaged in interrogating the origin and function of the Western canon (Gorak 1991; Searle 1990). In philosophy, a great deal of criticism was, as a result, directed at the traditional narrative of seventeenth-and eighteenth-century philosophies—a critique informed by postcolonialism (Park 2013) as well as feminist historiography (Shapiro 2016). D. F. Norton (1981), L. Loeb (1981) and many others1 attempted to demonstrate the weaknesses of the tripartite division between rationalism, empiricism and critical philosophy.2 As time went on, symptoms of dissatisfaction with what has been called the “standard narrative” ( Vanzo 2013) and the “epistemological par-adigm” (Haakonssen 2004, 2006) only increased. Indeed, at present, a consensus has been reached that the narrative of the antagonism between “Continental rationalism” and “British empiricism”, and the consequent Aufhebung provided by “German critical philosophy,” has been unable to make sense of the complexity, variety and dynamics of early modern.Fil: Antoine-Mahut, Delphine. Ecole Normale Supérieure; FranciaFil: Manzo, Silvia Alejandra. Consejo Nacional de Investigaciones Científicas y Técnicas. Centro Científico Tecnológico Conicet - La Plata. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales. Universidad Nacional de La Plata. Facultad de Humanidades y Ciencias de la Educación. Instituto de Investigaciones en Humanidades y Ciencias Sociales; Argentin

Protestant natural law theory: a general interpretation

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Natural Law

In early modern moral and political philosophy, the term “natural law” referred to a universal moral norm which human beings are able to recognize by using their natural faculties, without the supernatural information offered by the Bible, and which is, in one way or another, connected to human nature. Natural law had been a standard topic already in medieval philosophy, but the idea of such a universal norm received new significance as Europeans confronted and colonized non-Christian people, the Christian church itself was divided into rival confessional groups, and independent territorial states became the dominant form of political organization in Europe. As a result of these developments, the character, content and implications of natural law were widely debated in early modern scholarly literature. Even though all this was done by using concepts adopted from medieval scholasticism, early modern natural law should not be seen as a unified and evolving philosophical tradition, but rather as a series of attempts to redefine a collectively shared moral and legal vocabulary in order to justify what were often quite dissimilar political aims (see, e.g., Haakonssen and Seidler 2016; Westerman 1998; Hochstrasser 2000; Hunter 2011; Stolleis 2008).Peer reviewe

Hume jusnaturalista

Trata-se de investigar a relação de Hume com a tradição jusnaturalista moderna, indicando que, sua ênfase na necessidade de um consentimento ou acordo entre os homens como fundamento da propriedade pode ser vista como a reabilitação de uma certa vertente do jusnaturalismo contra aquela que se tornou preponderante a partir de Locke.<br>This paper aims to investigate the relationship between Hume and the modern tradition of natural law theories, indicating that his emphasis on the need of an accord or agreement as the foundation of property can be seen as the rehabilitation of an aspect of natural law theories against an other, predominant after Locke