Katerina Mihaylova

Christian Thomasius (1655-1728) was one of the leading philosophers of the German early Enlightenment. His work adopts the claim by Samuel Pufendorf (1632-1694) that Aristotelian philosophy fails to provide a proper foundation for moral philosophy and is not able to achieve more than merely probable moral norms. Like Pufendorf, Thomasius aims to derive an evident and valid principle of moral norms using human nature as a foundation. This article examines Thomasius' concept of justice as a moral norm and its relevance for his political philosophy. The first part of the article analyzes the arguments for Thomasius' claim that it is in the interest of the statesman and ruler to protect academic freedom. According to Thomasius, only the academic scholar is able to achieve knowledge of moral norms - especially the norm of justice - and to advise how to improve the laws of the state according to these norms (and, in this way, to help increase political stability). The second part of the article reconstructs Thomasius’ concept of justice. According to Thomasius, only justice (unlike other moral norms like decency and honesty) can be a universal moral norm because of its aim of protecting human life (and human abilities) from harm caused by the most negative effects of the passions i.e., hate and war which Thomasius also calls the maximal evil. The last part of the article deals with the question of political legitimation. It analyzes some continuities and discontinuities between Pufendorf and Thomasius and argues that in both philosophers political power is only legitimated by a normative concept of civil society, namely by following the common will of civil society which is to avoid war (i.e., to achieve security from the harms of hate and war) and to enable wealth (i.e., to create conditions for more cooperation and trade).

Moral judgements usually concern the moral responsibility of an acting person. Someone is considered praiseworthy or blameworthy for an action based on whether that action is in accordance with or against moral norms. On a Kantian account, the essential issue is the motivation of the acting person, as this is a criterion for being a moral cause of the action i.e. for intending it. Only moral causation permits the moral imputation of the action to the acting person, and moral motivation always implies the use of practical reason as the capacity of acting in accordance with rules (categorical or hypothetical). Giving priority to one of these leads to either moral merit or moral guilt. The morally guilty person treats himself or others merely as a means rather than respecting himself or others as persons, i.e. as individuals able to act according to their own aims. We find such an account in Johann Christoph Hoffbauer’s interpretation of Kant’s theory of free will. While Kant is occasionally accused of inconsistency in claiming both that evil actions are real and imputable and that only good actions are free (and therefore imputable), Hoffbauer offers a consistent version of Kant’s theory of free will. In this paper, I analyze his interpretation, first sketching its pre-Kantian theoretical context and then discussing Hoffbauer’s Kantian interpretation of the concepts of will and the faculty of choice, using the case of a lie as an illustration.

This paper examines the concept of hope in the epistemology and psychology of Immanuel Kant and Johann Christoph Hoffbauer (1766-1827). The decisive question is how according to Kant hope can impair the objectivity of judgements about future and what are the positive and negative effects of this impairment. While for Kant hope is not essentially considered as an affect, he admits that it could transform into an affect and in this way it can impair the mood and its cognitive faculties negatively. In my paper I examine this argumentations of Kant and their reception in the psychology and psychopathology of Hoffbauer, where hope as affect is even considered as a cause of madness and where Hoffbauer seems to suggest that the clinical state of madness can be effect of inappropriate use of the cognitive faculties of the soul.

Pufendorf makes a clear distinction between the physical constitution of human beings and their value as human beings, stressing that the latter is justified exclusively by the regular use of the free will. According to Pufendorf, the regular use of free will requires certain inventions (divine as well as human) imposed on the free will and called moral entities. He claims that these inventions determine the moral quality of a human being as well as the standards according to which human beings and their actions are able to be judged. This article examines the normative aspects of Pufendorf’s concepts of moral value and moral estimation in regard to the epistemological question of the accessibility of moral entities for human beings. In the first part, it reconstructs Pufendorf’s doctrine of moral entities and the place of moral estimation in this doctrine. In the second part, it presents Pufendorf’s account of the moral philosophy as a science in order to explain his theory of moral normativity as imposed, and the role of a person in regard to the own moral status. In the last part, it illustrates some consequences in regard to the problem of slavery in Pufendorf and shaws that for Pufendorf, forced slavery is against the natural law and should be avoided by political institutions.

In his "Elementa Iuris Naturae et Gentium" Johann Gottlieb Heineccius presents a unique account of love as the principle of natural law, referring to the main concern of early modern protestant theories of natural law: the importance of securing subjective rights by a law. Heineccius accepts the universal character of subjective rights derived from human nature, claiming their protection as natural duties required by a law. This chapter provides an attempt to explain the specific ways in which Heineccius deals with the paradoxical situation that the protection of subjective rights by a natural law theory requires certain limitations of the use of such rights, in order to avoid the mutual collision of such rights. For this purpose it focuses on the rights to free thought and free speech, which are very good example for that. While the first part reconstructs the way in which Heineccius claims the specific concern of natural law and points out continuities and discontinuities with his predecessors, the second part focuses on the requirement of natural law for limitation of free thought and free speech in case of collision of subjective rights.

The articles contained in this collection look at the displacements, upheavals and dislocations in the traditional definition of obligation as experienced in the 18th and early 19th centuries from the perspective of the humanities and cultural studies. The works in this volume not only focus on Kantian moral philosophy, as the pinnacle of a specific modern development, but also examine the diverse other concepts of obligation and how they were formulated through literature, aesthetics, politics and pedagogy.