Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson: Contesting Diversity in the Enlightenment and Beyond (Ideas in Context)
Language: English
Pages: 280
ISBN: 0521117461
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
Are human beings linked by a common nature, one that makes them see the world in the same moral way? Or are they fragmented by different cultural practices and values? These fundamental questions of our existence were debated in the Enlightenment by Locke, Shaftesbury, and Hutcheson. Daniel Carey provides an important new historical perspective on their discussion. At the same time, he explores the relationship between these founding arguments and contemporary disputes over cultural diversity and multiculturalism. Our own conflicting positions today reflect long-standing differences that emerged during the Enlightenment.
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Its portrait of different shapes and features of the Indians and Negroes. Here he suggested a role for the artistic virtuoso.26 Despite the relatively unfocused nature of the scheme, the method implied here is vital. For Oldenburg, acknowledgement of diversity represented the first step in understanding the world. By adopting this strategy, he transferred an important methodological assumption from natural history to the study of man. Diversity constituted an obvious fact of nature, and.
Antagonism toward a sceptical attitude on moral matters, quite independent of his emphasis on rewards and punishments in the afterlife and espousal of Scripture as a source of moral guidance.4 But this perspective on Locke has left at least one cause for puzzlement, namely the reaction of some early readers of the Essay who made the accusation that 2 3 4 See the entry on ‘scepticism’ in John W. Yolton, A Locke Dictionary (Oxford, 1993), 246–8; Michael Ayers, Locke: Epistemology and Ontology, 2.
The will of God. Even those who neglected to practise virtue nonetheless approved of good and condemned evil for the most part, which meant that, despite corrupt manners, what he called the ‘true Boundaries of the Law of Nature’ (II.xxviii.11) were still preserved. By treating any convergence between social practice and the law of nature as a happy coincidence, Locke kept reason out of the equation and avoided an implausible analysis which would have overstated the extent of human rationality in.
1953), 177. See also Locke’s later correspondence with John Lock, possibly a distant relative, who travelled to India in the service of the New East India Company; on 11 January 1703, Lock supplied him with information on local religions (Correspondence, VII: 736–7). Aurengzib reigned from 1658 to 1707. An account of him was given by Franc¸ois Bernier, Histoire de la dernie`re re´volution des E´tats du Grand Mogol, 2 vols. (Paris, 1670). John Dryden, Locke’s contemporary at Westminster School,.
Emphasis on law as an external force, obeyed prudentially, which depended on a model of human nature as essentially self-interested.14 Derivations of natural law from reason or from divine will neglected the moral sense located internally in human nature. In many ways his most distinctive contribution was to link these notions. Shaftesbury had ignored the language and tradition of natural law and natural rights. Hutcheson did not begin with these but he ensured that his version of the moral sense.