Tuesday 3 May 2016

Mads Langballe Jensen on 'Immoderate licentiousness in philosophising' or 'the liberty of a learned man': a conflict between theologians and lawyers in the early Danish enlightenment

The paper follows up on certain suggestions in my previous Kolloquium paper concerning the significance of Pufendorfian-Thomasian natural law in the first decades of the eighteenth century in Denmark, particularly in the controversy surrounding Andreas Hojer's Diagramma de Nuptiis Propinquorum Iure divino non prohibitis. It looks at the meta-arguments, so to speak, in Hojer's and the theologians' letters to King Frederik IV, which turned on the question on who had the authority to judge on matters pertaining to natural law, and how far the liberty to discuss social and political issues in public extended. It argues that the affair was part of a conflict over authority between lawyers and theologians in the decades around 1700 and illustrative of it.

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