Friend of American Creation Bill Fortenberry listed some philosophers
who influenced the American Founding with links to their understanding
of what the phrase "pursuit of happiness" meant to them. It was noted
that John Locke in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding invoked "pursuit of happiness." Interestingly, the Locke's famous "life liberty and property" derived from his Second Treatise on government.
Here is a link to Locke's specific use. Here are some other philosophers' use of that phrase: 1. Bolingbroke; 2. Joseph Priestley; 3. Shaftesbury; 4. Joseph Addison.
The
deck of those four or five seems to be tilted in favor of the thesis that it
was certain "key" or elite figures who possessed more heterodox ideas
that were in tension with those of the more orthodox powers that be.
1 comment:
The deck of those four or five seems to be tilted in favor of the thesis that it was certain "key" or elite figures who possessed more heterodox ideas that were in tension with those of the more orthodox powers that be.
I dunno about the "orthodox powers that be" part, since the great mass of men were similarly orthodox. Did this "elite" really influence much except when they pretended to be orthodox, such as Jefferson in his early years?
Did Priestley really change things much? His discovery of oxygen was actually 2 years after a Swede* and on the theo-political tip, they burned his house down in England and he was forced to flee to a rather indifferent America.
We could say that the Reformation spawned an "Enlightenment" where the most elite minds also fancied that they could re-invent the Christian religion even better than Luther, Calvin, and Wesley, et al., but that their religion part turned out to be just so much passed gas.
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*Oxygen was discovered for the first time by a Swedish Chemist, Carl Wilhelm Scheele, in 1772. Joseph Priestly, an English chemist, independently, discovered oxygen in 1774 and published his findings the same year, three years before Scheele published. Antoine Lavoisier, a French chemist, also discovered oxygen in 1775, was the first to recognize it as an element, and coined its name "oxygen" - which comes from a Greek word that means “acid-former”.
http://www.juliantrubin.com/bigten/oxygenexperiments.html
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