TYRRELL, James.

Inquire · Offered by Peter Harrington

A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature, First edition, possibly early state as this copy does not include the errata leaf and leaf f1 is not cancelled and replaced with a bifolium, as is the case for the copy collated in ESTC. A Brief Disquisition of the Law of Nature is an abridged translation by political theorist and historian James Tyrrell of Richard Cumberland's treatise heralding English utilitarianism, De legibus naturae disquisitio philosophica (1671). Tyrrell's adaptation juxtaposed Cumberland's theories with John Locke's and further developed Cumberland's criticism of Thomas Hobbes. De legibus naturae argued that "science and reason could support the notion of a divinely ordained natural law, rather than subverting it as the work of Hobbes appeared to suggest" (ODNB). Cumberland's discussion has been described as "distinctly 'modern' because he arrives at his conclusions without discussion of scripture, and he generates ethical norms without a discussion of the afterlife. He also deployed recent scientific discoveries to back up his ethical claims and discussed morality in mathematical terms" (ibid.) Tyrrell was one of Locke's closest friends and his adaptation "drew upon Locke's unpublished 'Essays on the law of nature', and locates Locke in the modern school of natural jurisprudence inaugurated by Hugo Grotius; he sees this tradition as an instrument against Hobbist Epicureanism. Tyrrell's central axiom is that natural law is reducible to the duty to seek the c

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