Natural Law and the Chair of Ethics in the University of Naples, 1703–1769

Bibliographic Data

ID7438663
AuthorsFelix Waldmann (0000-0003-1251-8600, Christ University, corresponding author)
Year2020
Volume19
Issue1
Pages54-80
Publication date2020-10-21
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueModern Intellectual History (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 1479-2443 • E-ISSN: 1479-2451
PublisherCambridge University Press (CUP) (PUBLISHER)
DOI10.1017/s1479244320000360
OpenAlexW3094172226
LanguageEN
References cited37

This articles focuses on a significant change to the curriculum in “ethics” (moral philosophy) in the University of Naples, superintended by Celestino Galiani, the rector of the university (1732–53), and Antonio Genovesi, Galiani's protégé and the university's professor of ethics (1746–54). The article contends that Galiani's and Genovesi's sympathies lay with the form of “modern natural law” pioneered by Hugo Grotius and his followers in Northern Europe. The transformation of curricular ethics in Protestant contexts had stemmed from an anxiety about its relevance in the face of moral skepticism. The article shows how this anxiety affected a Catholic context, and it responds to John Robertson's contention that Giambattista Vico's use of “sacred history” in his Scienza nuova (1725, revised 1730, 1744) typified a search among Catholics for an alternative to “scholastic natural law,” when the latter was found insufficiently to explain the sources of human sociability

Natural law · Natural Philosophy · Relevance · Skepticism · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Reformation and Early Modern Christianity · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

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