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Record W4387735195 · doi:10.32725/oph.2023.006

Was early modern natural law secularized? The current debates

2023· article· en· W4387735195 on OpenAlex
Ivo Cerman

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueOpera Historica · 2023
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSeventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
Canadian institutionsCanadian Historical Association
Fundersnot available
KeywordsSecularizationNatural lawHumanismNatural (archaeology)LawTheocracyPhilosophyPolitical scienceSociologyHistoryPolitics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Even though the idea that there was a one-way secularization of natural law in 17th century has been abandoned, it is still possible to speak about an unintentional long-term secularization of legal thought. This is the position advanced recently by Knud Haakonssen. I argue here that this approach also requires a focus on specific classical works that had „secularizing effects“. The matter may be complicated by changes that a classical work underwent in re-editions during the author’s lifetime, or by reinterpretations of a classical work itself that may reveal previously unknown religious undertones. On the other hand, contextual or clandestine texts by the author should not be regarded as relevant, but merely as other religious interests displayed by the author during his lifetime. This review article surveys current valid secularization theories, and then focuses on the recent volume Sacred Polities, edited by Hans W. Blom (2022). It raises a new question about the parallel „Hebraist natural law“ which existed side by side with the post-Grotian „secular natural law“. Petrus Cunaeus’s De republica Hebraeorum of 1617, which coined the term „theocracy“, is especially important. The chapters on Humanist natural law before Grotius show that the Danish Lutheran Hemmingsen had used a deductive method long before Pufendorf and Wolff. Recent research on Catholic natural law has underlined that the Catholics made a significant contribution in their optimistic conception of rational human nature. This is partly reflected in Blom’s volume, which also explains why the Neapolitan school of natural law was interested in Grotius’s conception. Finally, the chapters on Pufendorf demarcate the limits of human agency vis-à-vis divine voluntarism, and then in terms of political coercion in matters of religion. New research has established that Pufendorf rejected coercion only in fundamental matters of revealed religion, but admitted the use of force in uncertain religious issues. It has also been proved that Pufendorf ’s natural law was not backed by God arbitrarily, but within the framework of a „hypothetical necessity“.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.909
Threshold uncertainty score0.999

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0010.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.044
GPT teacher head0.250
Teacher spread0.207 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it