Luis de Molina (1535-1600) was the first scholastic doctor to legitimize the practice of money lending as a career. His De Iustitia et Iure offers a thorough description of trade practices of the vibrant economies of Portugal and Spain in the Sixteenth Century. This detailed analysis allows him to provide a moral assessment of these practices. His treatise is a capital example of how a deep commitment to received tradition and to contemporary economic issues can advance economic science and perfect moral theology through a better understanding of reality. This book shows how threads of field research, economic reflection, natural law tradition, casuistry and the quest for justice may weave together to form a major work of Catholic moral theology.

This book shows how threads of field research, economic reflection, natural law tradition, casuistry and the quest for justice weave together in Luis de Molina’s De Iustitia et Iure, thus forming a major work of Catholic moral theology.

Since his rediscovery by Alwin Plantinga in the 1970s, the possibility of counterfactuals of freedom in Molinism has become one of the main issues in the contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. Notwithstanding this, Luis de Molina (1535-1600) remains one of the most influential and least known authors of late scholasticism and early modern philosophy. The papers collected in this volume treat the whole range of issues posed by his metaphysics as set out in his revolutionary "Concordia" and in his practical philosophy - especially concerning law and economics - in his groundbreaking work "De Justitia et Jure". They also examine Molina's historical commitments and his influences on philosophy. In this way this Companion offers the first comprehensive and thorough overview of Molina's thought.

Voices of Conscience analyzes how the link between politics and conscience was articulated and shaped throughout the seventeenth century by confessors who acted as counsellors to monarchs. Against the backdrop of the momentous intellectual, theological, and political shifts that marked this period, the study examines comparatively how the ethical challenges of political action were confronted in Spain and France and how questions of conscience became a major argument in the hegemonic struggle between the two competing Catholic powers. As Nicole Reinhardt demonstrates, 'counsel of conscience' was not a peripheral feature of early-modern political culture, but fundamental for the definition of politics and conscience. Tracing the rise and fall of confessors as counsellors reveals the parallel transformation of both, approaching a historical understanding of the modernisation of politics with the idea of an 'individual conscience' at its heart. Placed at the junction of norms and practices, royal confessors, directly or in oblique reflection, shaped the ways in which the royal conscience was identified and scrutinized. By the same token, the royal confessors' expertise and activities remained a source of anxiety and conflict that triggered wide debate on the relationship between State and Church, religion and politics. The notion of 'counsel of conscience', of which this book provides the first in-depth analysis, allows the reader to re-examine and challenge fundamental historical paradigms such as the emergence of 'absolutism', individualisation, and the division of public and private. Putting theological concepts and religious dimensions back into political theory and practice sheds new light, not only on the importance of counselling for early modern statecraft, but also on the reconfiguration of the normative frameworks underlying it.

Scholarship on the moral and political philosophy of the ‘School of Salamanca’ has either long been emphasizing the discontinuity between medieval and modern philosophy and the way this discontinuity is represented in the works of these authors or discussing issues of moral justification that are often seen as the heart of early modern practical philosophy. This volume offers a fresh perspective by focusing on the concept of law. This allows for an in-depth analysis of a variety of normative issues in the authors’ moral and political thought. It also suggest a more continuous picture of the transition from medieval to modern philosophy and proposes a more nuanced view of the importance of political concepts in the authors’s practical philosophy.

Dieser Band versammelt unter der Frage nach der Normativitat des Rechts Untersuchungen zu Autoren der Schule von Salamanca. Die Vitalitat dieses Diskussionszusammenhangs wird deutlich in den kontroversen und innovativen Stellungnahmen von Vitoria, Soto, Las Casas, Sepulveda, Covarrubias, Acosta, Veracruz, Suarez, Molina und F. Vazquez zu Fragen der Rechtsgeltung. Diese interdisziplinaren und uber die Grenzen Europas hinausreichenden Debatten haben weitreichende Bedeutung fur die Ausbildung des modernen Rechtsverstandnisses. Mit Beitragen (deutsch, englisch) u.a. von Georg Cavallar, Nils Jansen (nicht in der ebook-Version verfugbar), Matthias Kaufmann, Hernan Neira, Merio Scattola, Christian Schafer, Kurt Seelmann, Gideon Stiening und Jorg A. Tellkamp.Concerned with the question of the normativity of law, the present volume collects essays on the authors of the 'School of Salamanca'. In this context, authors such as Vitoria, Soto, Las Casas, Sepulveda, Covarrubias, Acosta, Veracruz, Suarez, Molina and F. Vazquez have commented on the normative claim and validity of law. These interdisciplinary debates reached far beyond Europe and have a lasting influence on the modern understanding of law. With English and German contributions by Georg Cavallar, Nils Jansen (not available in the ebook-Version), Matthias Kaufmann, Hernan Neira, Merio Scattola, Christian Schafer, Kurt Seelmann, Gideon Stiening und Jorg A. Tellkamp.

Francisco de Vitoria wird häufig zu den Begründern des >modernen

Die in diesem Band vereinigten Beiträge untersuchen die Bedeutung der religiösen Reformbewegungen ab dem 16. Jahrhundert für die moderne Rechtsentwicklung an einem spezifischen Gegenstand: am Rechtsstatus der in allen Konfessionen aktuellen Berufung auf das Gewissen. So führt der Band sonst oft separat betriebene Forschungen über die Traditionsbildung in und nach den Lehren lutherischer, calvinischer und römisch-katholischer Theologen und Juristen des 16., 17. und frühen 18. Jahrhunderts exemplarisch vergleichend zusammen. Insbesondere gehen die Untersuchungen der Frage nach, inwiefern die konfessionell geprägten Rechtslehren miteinander in Wechselwirkung standen. Sie umfassen Themen zu Rechtskonzepten des Gewissens sowie zu ihrer Umsetzung in den Lehren vom Öffentlichen Recht und vom Kirchenrecht aus theologie-, rechts- und philosophiegeschichtlichen Perspektiven. The essays joined in this volume investigate the role of the religious reform movements since the 16th century in the transformation of the Western legal tradition, focussing on a particular topic: how Jurisprudence had to deal with the reference to conscience, virulent for all confessional positions. Research on the teachings of Lutheran, Calvinist, and Roman Catholic theologians and jurists from the 16th up to the early 18th century, most often examined separately, is brought together in a comparative perspective. The essays comprise studies on legal concepts of conscience and on their implementation in the teachings in Public Law and in Canon or Ecclesiastical Law from the perspectives of theology, law, and philosophy.

This Companion aims to give an up-to-date overview of the historical context and the conceptual framework of Spanish imperial expansion during the early modern period, mostly during the 16th century. It intends to offer a nuanced and balanced account of the complexities of this historically controversial period analyzing first its historical underpinnings, then shedding light on the normative language behind imperial theorizing and finally discussing issues that arose with the experience of the conquest of American polities, such as colonialism, slavery or utopia. The aim of this volume is to uncover the structural and normative elements of the theological, legal and philosophical arguments about Spanish imperial ambitions in the early modern period. Contributors are Manuel Herrero Sánchez, José Luis Egío, Christiane Birr, Miguel Anxo Pena González, Tamar Herzog, Merio Scattola, Virpi Mäkinen, Wim Decock, Christian Schäfer, Francisco Castilla Urbano, Daniel Schwartz, Felipe Castañeda, José Luis Ramos Gorostiza, Luis Perdices de Blas, Beatriz Fernández Herrero.

The definitive source for information about the entire range of religious and social changes that altered the face of Europe in the sixteenth century, encompassing not only issues of church polity and theology but also developments in politics, economics, demographics, art and literature. This broadly cast, interdisciplinary definition allows for a comprehensive social and intellectual history of early modern Europe.