ABSTRACT

During the century following Aquinas's death, and in the wake of the historic Parisian condemnation of 1277 of a host of philosophical propositions, many of the rationalistic convictions characteristic of Aquinas and of those who in some measure shared his fundamental essentialism were called into question. All of the nominalist/voluntarist thinkers had been careful to insist with Ockham that 'there is no distinction between the will and essence and will and intellect' of God. In Ockham later political and polemical writings, however, especially the Opus nonaginta dierum and the massive Dialogus, he explicitly evoked such a natural-law doctrine, and did so in much the same way as those traditional rationalists who were committed to one or other form of metaphysical essentialism. The voluntarist position, firmly enunciated by Hobbes and by Locke, too, was projected forward into the eighteenth century, especially by such proponents of natural law and of the law of nations as Samuel Pufendorf and his pupil Christian Thomasius.