Description
Book SynopsisThe early enlightenment has been seen as an epoch-making period in the development of modern Europe, marking the beginnings of the transition from a ''religious'' to an essentially ''secular'' understanding of human relations and generating in the process new accounts of the relationship between religion and politics, in which the idea of toleration figured centrally. In this volume of essays, leading scholars in the field challenge that view and explore the ways in which some of the most important discussions of toleration in the western tradition were shaped by understandings of natural theology and natural law. Far from representing a shift to non-religious ways of thinking about the world, the essays reveal the extent to which early enlightenment discussions of toleration presupposed a world-view in which God-given natural law established the boundaries between church and state and provided the primary point of reference for understanding claims to religious freedom. The book offer
Table of Contents1. Religious Commitment and Secular Reason: Pufendorf on the Separation between Religion and Politics ; 2. Samuel Pufendorf and Religious Intolerance in the Early Enlightenment ; 3. Natural law, Nonconformity and Toleration: Two Stages on Locke's Way ; 4. John Locke and Natural Law: Free Worship and Toleration ; 5. The Tolerationist Programmes of Thomasius and Locke ; 6. Leibniz's Doctrine of Toleration: Philosophical, Theological, and Pragmatic Reasons ; 7. Toleration as Impartiality? Civil and Ecclesiastical Toleration in Jean Barbeyrac ; 8. Natural Rights or Political Prudence? Francis Hutcheson on Toleration ; Postface. The Grounds for Toleration and the Capacity to Tolerate
