Knud Haakonssen is going to present a working paper on 'Natural law and moral philosophy in the Scottish Enlightenment'

The paper is my contribution to a new edition of The Cambridge Companion to the Scottish Enlightenment, ed. A. Broadie & C. Smith (forthcoming late in 2018). The paper is therefore primarily written for an English speaking audience, and this is reflected in the choice of secundary literature. The first section sets the European scene. Section 2 details the institutional adoption of the subject as part of the curriculum in moral philosophy in the five Scottish universities. Section 3 sketches the social function of the natural law works that issued from the academic teaching. The final and longest section attempts an over-all interpretation of the amorphous body of ideas that made up natural jurisprudence as the Enlightenment’s ‘practical ethics’. Readers with limited time or patience may want to concentrate on section 4.

Knud Haakonssen presents a working paper on 'Early Modern Natural Law: An Introduction'

This text is part of a basic introduction to early-modern natural law. It has to be read with the following limitations in mind. The piece has been written for an Englishlanguage audience, and all the references (except for titles of primary sources) are to works in English. In its fuller and properly scholarly version I do of course draw on the extensive literature in other languages, especially German, just as I engage with the critical literature. Secondly, the seminar text barely goes beyond the middle of the 18th century, except for a few references concerning French thought; the section on German natural law in the later 18th and early 19th century has been cut entirely for reasons of space – but see the final reference. Thirdly, it is useful to distinguish the history I am trying to outline from the overlapping history of rights (see some remarks on this at pp. 16-17). Finally, this paper sticks – more or less – to the highways of natural law, but it is meant as a map from which the byways are pursued through much closer contextualisation, especially localisation, in the form of case studies of individual thinkers, locales and themes. A few of my case studies have been presented in earlier seminars at MWK, and a great deal more is being done within the network on Natural Law 1625-1850. The cumulative effect of this work is likely to be that my current routes have to be amended and supplemented, indeed that some of them may turn out to be blind alleys. In other words, this is work that I explicitly entertain as an invitation to have it undermined.

Eleonore Schulz presents a working paper on 'Auf den Spuren von Eulogius Schneider'

The paper presents an overview of the current state of my PhD project. In order to elaborate concepts of liberty/freedom I chose to follow the life and development of the Catholic theologian and Jacobin politician Eulogius Schneider. Based on his biography I explore the development of concepts of  liberty/freedom in the context of personal relationships and networks as well as social and political
developments. The present paper focuses on Schneider’s time as a court chaplain in Stuttgart. The sources show two crucial aspects regarding liberty/freedom: the tension between a definition by natural law and by teleology as well as the tension between a teleological term of liberty/freedom and the apology of enlighted absolutism.

Peter Schröder is going to present a paper on 'Trust and Mistrust in Early Eighteenth Century International Political Thought, 1713-1763'

This project builds on my previous work on seventeenth century international political thought to explore the role of trust and mistrust between European states in the emergence of international political thought through the first half of the eighteenth century, from the Peace of Utrecht in 1713 to the Peace of Paris in 1763. In the short introductory part I will give an overview of some of my leading research questions my project wants to tackle, before the second part presents a preliminary case study of two eighteenth century natural law thinkers, i.e. Johann Jacob Schmauß (1690-1757) and Johann Gottlieb Heineccius (1681-1741).

Knud Haakonssen presents a paper 'To know yourself – that’s a whole crowd! Ludvig Holberg as a case study of multiple authorial personae'

This is a revised and expanded version of a lecture that I gave at the Gotha Forschungszentrum in January. The reason for reviving the paper is that it addresses central issues discussed in the KFG plenaries preparing for the end time (cf. the theses from Martin Mulsow and me). The paper is thus not part of my project on natural law. Nor is it theoretical, or methodological, in character; rather, it provides a case study of multiple authorial personae, namely, the work of the Danish polymath Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754). I show how Holberg uses the techniques of contemporary eclecticism in a wide variety of works and genres of works. I suggest that this goes along with an espistemic attitude that is somewhat different from the usual moderate scepticism often associated with eclecticism. And I indicate how a many-sided ambiguity about the supposedly ‘real’ author is effected in order to secure space for a basic, somewhat simplistic but earnest religiosity without jeopardising the pervasive pluralism. A key factor here is the ‘creation’ of the audience, including the scholars who nearly three centuries later pursue the real Holberg. But he, too, is always a persona for an audience. The conclusion – if any – is that it is a kind of category mistake to ask what ‘he’ really believed.

Knud Haakonssen presents a paper on 'To know yourself – that’s a whole crowd! Ludvig Holberg as a case study of multiple authorial personae'

This is a revised and expanded version of a lecture that I gave at the Gotha Forschungszentrum in January. The reason for reviving the paper is that it addresses central issues discussed in the KFG plenaries preparing for the end time (cf. the theses from Martin Mulsow and me). The paper is thus not part of my project on natural law. Nor is it theoretical, or methodological, in character; rather, it provides a case study of multiple authorial personae, namely, the work of the Danish polymath Ludvig Holberg (1684-1754). I show how Holberg uses the techniques of contemporary eclecticism in a wide variety of works and genres of works. I suggest that this goes along with an espistemic attitude that is somewhat different from the usual moderate scepticism often associated with eclecticism. And I indicate how a many-sided ambiguity about the supposedly ‘real’ author is effected in order to secure space for a basic, somewhat simplistic but earnest religiosity without jeopardising the pervasive pluralism. A key factor here is the ‘creation’ of the audience, including the scholars who nearly three centuries later pursue the real Holberg. But he, too, is always a persona for an audience. The conclusion – if any – is that it is a kind of category mistake to ask what ‘he’ really believed.

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.

Petra Gümplová presents a paper on 'Sovereignty, Human Rights, and Rights to Natural Resources'

This paper is a part of a larger project which aims at providing criteria for a critical appraisal of the international system of sovereign rights to natural resources and at elaboration of a conception which emphasizes limits on states’ rights to natural resources.
'In the paper 'Sovereignty, Human Rights, and Rights to Natural Resources' I explore the historical affinity between international law of human rights and rights of states to natural resources and the aim of both systems to realize the international justice. The paper assumes a practice-based approach to human rights and argues that the chief purpose of human rights is to provide a universal standard for regulating the behavior of states, to limit their sovereignty for the sake of promoting welfare and protecting equal moral status of individuals. The key point of the paper is then to show that due to the historical co-originality and due to the transformative impact human rights have had on state sovereignty, international human rights law has direct implication for how we should interpret the scope of states' rights to natural resources – regarding the scope of resource rights and the conditions of their rightful exercise by states as well as the model of the international system of natural resource governance.'