Hobbes: Context

La silogística aristotélica muestra algunos antecedentes del formalismo lógico en tanto sistema deductivo axiomático que emplea nociones de implicación y validez, además de usar variables en los términos. Los megárico-estoicos estudiaron la implicación material y formal o estricta, mientras que los escolásticos formaron ideas sobre un lenguaje depurado para la lógica. Además de las ideas de Lulio, Descartes, Leibniz o Hobbes, los estudios combinatorios de Alberto Magno, la insistencia de Roger Bacon en la importancia de la matemática como paradigma de (...) la demostración en las ciencias y en la lógica, y las consideraciones formales de Juan Buridan y Walter Burleigh sobre la lógica pura en tanto estudio sitáctico-semántico de los esquemas de inferencia y los principios primitivos que comandan el funcionamiento de la lógica, son algunos antecedentes del cálculo lógico que vino por primera vez con George Boole en el siglo XIX. (shrink)

Idiosyncrasies of Hobbes's composition process, together with a paucity of reliable autobiographical materials and the norms of seventeenth-century manuscript production, render interpretation of his political theory particularly difficult and contentious. These difficulties are surveyed here under three headings: the process of "serial" composition, which was common in the period; the relationship between Hobbes's three political-theory texts-- the "Elements of Law, De Cive ", and "Leviathan", which is basic to defining the textual embodiment of his theory, and controversial; and his method (...) of writing. I argue that Hobbes's composition process undercut his intention to produce a deductive, logical theory of politics and opened the door to inconsistency and muddle in his arguments. (shrink)

No doctrine of Pufendorf's is better known than that of socialitas. The reason is that Pufendorf himself declared that socialitas was the foundation of natural law. No interpreter of Pufendorf can therefore avoid dealing with it. Moreover, Pufendorf linked the issue of socialitas to the question of the state of nature, thus raising important issues with both theological and philosophical implications.Given the prominence and importance of this theme in Pufendorf's work, a close analysis of what he meant by it is (...) central to the interpretation of his work, even though this means to pose again a new number of questions already discussed in the scholarly literature. In particular, this article examines the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes with regard to this central theme. In fact, a traditional historiographic topos is that Pufendorf and Hobbes fundamentally disagree on the doctrine of socialitas, while the former is closer to Grotius and to the Aristotelian-classic tradition that see man as a social animal.This article takes, instead, Pufendorf to be a follower of Hobbes, and tries to explain how the more traditional view of Pufendorf as a critic of Hobbes was in some way due to Pufendorf's own attempt to distance himself from the accusations of Hobbesism that the critics made against him when his work first appeared. In order to do this, Pufendorf tried to rethink his own position within the history of ethics, and put himself on the side of the Stoics, of Grotius and of Cumberland, against Epicurus and Hobbes. This retrospective ‘illusion’ has greatly influenced later scholarship, giving us a distorted image of Pufendorf's own view of socialitas. A more precise account of the latter gives a better prospective from which to look at the relationship between Pufendorf and Hobbes. (shrink)

This article recounts Foucault’s critical reevaluation of Thomas Hobbes in his 1975-76 lecture course, published as Society Must Be Defended (2003). In probing Hobbes’ pivotal role in the foundation of the modern nation-state, Foucault delineates the ”philosophico-juridical” discourse of Leviathan from the ”historico-political” discourses of the English insurrectionists whose uncompromising demands were ultimately paved over by the more conventional seventeenth century debate between royalists and parliamentarians. In his most sustained engagement with political philosophy proper, Foucault effectively severs the two co-constitutive (...) terms, enumerating the damning consequences of thinking politics apart from history and philosophy apart from the laws and codes that had been “born in the mud and blood of battles.” Displacing himself in the archive, Foucault doubles the Levellers and Diggers’ efforts to restage the violent conquests that undergird our seemingly calm governmental regimes. This doubling, I argue, evinces the profound influence of Deleuze’s innovative ontology of time on Foucault’s genealogical method. Foucault’s research strategy takes a fundamental turn towards specific techniques of cultural memory in the wake of his colleague’s radical reconceptualization of virtuality, difference, and repetition. To this end, I take up Foucault’s review essay ”Theatrum Philosophicum” and his comments on method in ”Nietzsche, Genealogy, History” in order to draw an analogy between what he does in 1976 and what the Levellers and Diggers were doing in 1651. In the final analysis, genealogy means war, and, in this war, it is the very being of the virtual itself that is at stake. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whose current reputation rests largely on his political philosophy, was a thinker with wide ranging interests. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelian alternatives. In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and lead him into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the early Royal Society. In history, he translated Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War into English, and later wrote his own history of the Long Parliament. (...) In mathematics he was less successful, and is best remembered for his repeated unsuccessful attempts to square the circle. But despite that, Hobbes was a serious and prominent participant in the intellectual life of his time. (shrink)

This chapter concentrates on the mimetic theory of Rene Girard in evaluating foundational myths of violence. It shows Girard's notion of the scapegoating mechanism, whereby a substitute victim absorbs the mimetic animosities of the entire group and thereby promotes peace, as applicable to the disturbing tendency to direct violence outward toward exogenous groups. According to Girard, competition is the main source of human violence. His explanation, that violence has its roots in competition or mimetic rivalry, contributes to Thomas Hobbes, who (...) also highlighted this cause of violence at the beginning of the modern era. The Abrahamic solidarity with the victim easily becomes an aggressive weapon if taking the side of the victim is not connected with the forgiveness of persecutors. Girard interprets the imitation of Christ in the context of rivalries prohibited in the tenth commandment of the First Testament. -/- . (shrink)

RESUMEN Se busca mostrar la fuerte herencia voluntarista tardo-medieval de origen escotista en la filosofía política moderna, sobre todo en Bodino, Maquiavelo y Hobbes, pero también en Locke, Rousseau y Kant. Se examina la concepción escotista del poder y su fundamentación filosófico-teológica, así como algunos tópicos de su "nueva" metafísica y antropología para desglosar sus consecuencias directas o indirectas en la filosofía política moderna. ABSTRACT The article seeks to demonstrate the strong late medieval voluntaristic legacy of Scotus in modern political (...) philosophy, especially in Bodin, Machiavelli, and Hobbes, but also in Locke, Rousseau, and Kant. It examines the Scotist conception of power and its philosophical-theological foundations, as well as some of the topics of his "new" metaphysics and anthropology in order to identify their direct or indirect consequences for modern political philosophy. (shrink)

En este artículo, se estudiará la defensa de Suárez de la potestad indirecta, así como la crítica de Hobbes, tema descuidado por la bibliografía. A pesar de que se suele considerar la postura suareciana como moderada, insistiré en su similitud con la teocracia. Por otra parte, aunque se reconocerá a Hobbes como más cercano a la solución contemporánea, se recordará que su pulsión monocrática le impide dar cuenta de cómo es posible la coexistencia armónica de un poder civil y otro (...) religioso. (shrink)

Accounts of Hobbes’s ‘system’ of sciences oscillate between two extremes. On one extreme, the system is portrayed as wholly axiomtic-deductive, with statecraft being deduced in an unbroken chain from the principles of logic and first philosophy. On the other, it is portrayed as rife with conceptual cracks and fissures, with Hobbes’s statements about its deductive structure amounting to mere window-dressing. This paper argues that a middle way is found by conceiving of Hobbes’s _Elements of Philosophy_ on the model of a (...) mixed-mathematical science, not the model provided by Euclid’s _Elements of Geometry_. I suggest that Hobbes is a test case for understanding early-modern system-construction more generally, as inspired by the structure of the applied mathematical sciences. This approach has the additional virtue of bolstering, in a novel way, the thesis that the transformation of philosophy in the long seventeenth century was heavily indebted to mathematics, a thesis that has increasingly come under attack in recent years. (shrink)

Certain English writers of the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, whom scholars often associate with classical republicanism, were not, in fact, hostile to liberalism. Indeed, these thinkers contributed to a synthesis of liberalism and modern republicanism. As this book argues, Marchamont Nedham, James Harrington, Henry Neville, Algernon Sidney, and John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon, the co-authors of a series of editorials entitled Cato's Letters, provide a synthesis that responds to the demands of both republicans and liberals by offering a politically (...) engaged citizenry as well as the protection of individual rights. The book also reinterprets the writings of Machiavelli and Hobbes to show that each contributed in a fundamental way to the formation of this liberal republicanism. (shrink)

_ Source: _Volume 29, Issue 1, pp 66 - 85 This paper will deal with the notion of _conatus_ and the role it plays in Hobbes’s program for natural philosophy. As defined by Hobbes, the _conatus_ of a body is essentially its instantaneous motion, and he sees this as the means to account for a variety of phenomena in both natural philosophy and mathematics. Although I foucs principally on Hobbesian physics, I will also consider the extent to which Hobbes’s account (...) of _conatus_ does important explanatory work in his theory of human perception, psychology, and political philosophy. I argue that, in the end, there are important limitations in Hobbes’s account of _conatus_, but that Leibniz adapted the concept in important ways in developing his science of dynamics. (shrink)

Shakespeare between Machiavelli and Hobbes explores Shakespeare’s political outlook by comparing some of the playwright’s best-known works to the works of Italian political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli and English social contract theorist Thomas Hobbes. This ultimately reveals the materialist principles that underpin Shakespeare’s imaginary states.

The paper focuses upon two samples of early modern “civil sciences”: rhetorical inquiry dealing with contingency and mathesis politica traditionally referring to the intellectual context of early Enlightenment. The study deals with the main tendencies that shaped early Enlightenment political science consisting of criticism of the necessitarian ethical rhetorical paradigm, an appeal to rhetorical competence, search for a way to “tame” contingency and thus to learn how to understand the human will’s universe of effects and how to control it. Special (...) attention is paid to the famous “new sciences”: Giambattista Vico’s scienza nuova and Thomas Hobbes scientia civilis. The fundamental difference in Vico’s and Hobbes’ theoretical styles is emphasized. While Hobbs is “macro-sociological” and handles issues extreme and ultimate, that allow neither interim decisions nor close attention to historical niceties, Vico considers the matter of his science as a universe of contingency, defining scienza nuova as history. Particular attention is paid to the function of the topical-rhetorical discourse in Hobbes’ political science, used for the description of the prepolitical man. Drawing upon almost unknown 17th-century Dutch political writings, the study examines ways of the reception of Hobbes’ civil science conceived as a rhetorical inquiry. The authors also explore Vico’s alternative to Hobbes’ constructionist theoretical style. A vast array of contemporary theoretical approaches to the early modern political thought is analyzed, from the “Cambridge history of concepts” to N.S. Struever’s “modal rhetoric”. (shrink)

I offer an alternative account of the relationship of Hobbesian geometry to natural philosophy by arguing that mixed mathematics provided Hobbes with a model for thinking about it. In mixed mathematics, one may borrow causal principles from one science and use them in another science without there being a deductive relationship between those two sciences. Natural philosophy for Hobbes is mixed because an explanation may combine observations from experience (the ‘that’) with causal principles from geometry (the ‘why’). My argument shows (...) that Hobbesian natural philosophy relies upon suppositions that bodies plausibly behave according to these borrowed causal principles from geometry, acknowledging that bodies in the world may not actually behave this way. First, I consider Hobbes's relation to Aristotelian mixed mathematics and to Isaac Barrow's broadening of mixed mathematics in Mathematical Lectures (1683). I show that for Hobbes maker's knowledge from geometry provides the ‘why’ in mixed-mathematical explanations. Next, I examine two explanations from De corpore Part IV: (1) the explanation of sense in De corpore 25.1-2; and (2) the explanation of the swelling of parts of the body when they become warm in De corpore 27.3. In both explanations, I show Hobbes borrowing and citing geometrical principles and mixing these principles with appeals to experience. (shrink)

In this major 2003 study of the foundations of modern political theory the eminent political philosopher Ross Harrison explains, analyzes, and criticizes the work of Hobbes, Locke, and their contemporaries. He provides a full account of the turbulent historical background that shaped the political, intellectual, and religious content of this philosophy. The book explores such questions as the limits of political authority and the relation of the legitimacy of government to the will of its people in non-technical, accessible prose that (...) will appeal to students of philosophy, politics, theology and history. (shrink)

This is a review of a book by Ted H. Miller.

This is a review of a book edited by Richard Talaska.

There is no doubt about considering Thomas Hobbes as one of the most radical shields of XVII century mechanistic materialism, which explains phenomena according to laws of bodily motion. Agreeing to such an explicatory system, every single movement is caused by an external one, which implies that there is neither a self-moving body nor a body whose cause of motion is itself. However, a main idea is conceived by Hobbes himself, namely, the consideration of a vital or animal motion in (...) certain bodies. Is such a suggestion about qualitative difference between bodies? Are animated bodies able to be grounded to equal explicatory principles of mechanism? William Harvey's blood circulation and heart beating claims allow us to safeguard the Hobbes' theory coherence. (shrink)

In addition to an account of that most irascible, dogmatic, and revolutionary philosopher, Thomas Hobbes, a primary objective of this dissertation was to explore the climate of opinion during the first seventy years of seventeenth-century England, as expressed by the scholars and writers who sounded that consensus, not only in direct response to the disturbing doctrines of Hobbes, but indirectly reflected the defense of traditional ideas and institutions, together with the hopeful acceptance of change in matters religious and political in (...) a period of tumult and turmoil. ;The Hobbesian philosophy, portending the future in its materialism, yet aberrational in its acknowledgement of complete absolutism, excited responses from intellectuals--churchmen, politicians, schoolmen, and scientists, both at home and abroad, responses that supply us with an additional understanding of seventeenth-century thought. The bold and insensitive pronouncements of this complex genius were not only disturbing to his fellows but were to influence scholars and stimulate debate for centuries to come. ;The purpose of this dissertation, then, is not only to study and reassess Hobbes, the most controversial figure of his century, but what is certainly more important in an historical sense, to learn more about the century in which he lived through the responses of his critics. (shrink)

This study explores early nominalist themes in Thomas Hobbes and George Lawson as they argued over the construction of political order through words and covenants. Medieval nominalism asserted that God created order by His power, reason, will, and words, expressed in fiats and covenants. Hobbes transferred elements of this divine process to man's creation of social, political, and even scientific orders, believing that God had essentially given only one command as He left men to create reality, that it be peaceful. (...) ;George Lawson, an Anglican-Puritan pastor, was, like Hobbes, alarmed by England's civil war and wrote an extensive treatise on ecclesiastical and civil government, Politica sacra et civilis. Lawson challenged Hobbes in his Examination of the Political Part of Mr. Hobbs his Leviathan , defending a more conventional development of Reformational political theology also rooted in medieval nominalism. (government was legitimated by divine words, natural and revealed, and by custom as it reflected the will of the community over time. Thus God and time provided substantive information to guide the construction of legitimate social and political orders. As ultimate sovereign, God had informed men of their duties and relationships to Himself and each other, which ecclesiastical and civil governments were to uphold by relatively limited procedural means. Scholars who know Lawson's work have described him as a precursor to John Locke. ;Hobbes, on the other hand, challenged the existence of any divinely created pre-political order that men could know, and instead emphasized man's desperate need to construct order out of social chaos. Thus the dispute between Lawson and Hobbes originated in their pre-political visions as they addressed questions regarding how the convergence of God, man, and history defines values, laws, and rights. These issues retain currency in today's theorizing on the "social construction" of fundamental human identity and political order. This study, therefore, attempts to shed light on the genesis of early modern liberalism by comparing two forms of nominalism that continue to compete for influence in liberal societies: the original biblical one represented by George Lawson, and an essentially secular form articulated by Thomas Hobbes. (shrink)

This project explores Milton's participation in the political philosophy that developed largely as a consequence of the English Civil War, and aims, in doing so, to understand how this new philosophy shaped literary representation. The relationship between literature and philosophy in the seventeenth century has been so often seen as Cartesian in nature; I hope to offer a new way of understanding this relationship. While Milton, Hobbes and Locke use something close to Cartesian standards to gauge the accuracy of their (...) moral and political claims, they are also interested in quite different problems in epistemology: how humans reason, and how they come to obtain moral knowledge. These writers use models of human nature and reason to form the basis of their political theories, and it is this non-Cartesian component in the foundations of political philosophy that, I argue, more formatively shaped literary representation. Accordingly, the first chapter supplies a broad overview of the philosophical changes in seventeenth-century England, and their relation to problems in representation and literary theory. I then turn, in the chapter on Areopagitica, to underscore the significance of Milton's theories of knowledge in the larger philosophical context. The third chapter traces Hobbes's response to these models in the Leviathan, in which he proposes an opposing theory of human understanding. In the preface to Gondibert, Hobbes and William Davenant apply Hobbes's epistemology to literary theory. The fourth chapter explores a similar relation between Milton's representative theories and practices in Paradise Lost and the epistemological concerns raised in Areopagitica, De Doctrina Christiana, and other prose works. The fifth chapter looks at how the crisis of political methodology shaped the narrative of Paradise Lost. The new methodology worked against old ways of deriving political truths from biblical power structures and precepts, and Milton's epic works against these forms of argument by suggesting different models of human nature and reason, and by suggesting a dissociative relation between biblical and earthly power structures. The concluding chapter looks at how these problems in epistemology and methodology impacted the philosophy of Locke, particularly in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding and Two Treatises of Government. (shrink)

How did the mechanical philosophy replace Aristotelianism as the philosophical "mainstream" in the seventeenth century? I look at this question by examining critiques of Aristotle in the first two systematic mechanical philosophers, Descartes and Hobbes, and how these critiques fit in with earlier Renaissance anti-Aristotelianism. ;I focus on Descartes's and Hobbes's accounts of the human soul, because this is where their critiques of Aristotle are most clear and where they also differ the most from each other. According to Aristotelian philosophers, (...) human beings, like other living beings, had both a body and a soul. The soul was the substantial form of the body, the thing that gave that body life and the activities of life. Since the Aristotelian account of the human soul had become associated with Christian doctrine concerning immortality, any new competing philosophical system would also have to address the human soul in this context. In Descartes's system there are two different kinds of substances, material substance or body, and immaterial substance or soul. He believed that the Aristotelian notion of "substantial form" derived from a corruption of the clear ideas of body and mind. ;For Hobbes, there are no immaterial things, neither the substantial forms of the Aristotelians nor the immaterial minds of Descartes. These are just meaningless words, instances of the error of "insignificant speech" which he believed to be the foundation of Aristotelianism. ;These different accounts of the human being were difficult to reconcile with the Christian religion, and both philosophers developed strategies for presenting their philosophy in light of this. But instead of looking at the mechanical philosophy as a chapter in a "march of secularism", and religious issues as mere obstacles to progress, we should consider them rather as issues to be worked out by any new philosophical system. There were many ways of being a mechanical philosopher, and many roads to modern philosophy. (shrink)

How did Thomas Hobbes and John Milton understand the relation between religiously based conflict and the sovereign state? Milton's thought is an ideal counterpoint to Hobbes's understanding of religious strife as a threat to the peace and comfortable self preservation of the members of society. Little scholarly work has been devoted to comparing the two thinkers. Historically, they reflected on the same events of the day in 17th century England, notably the civil war. Philosophically, their theories ran counter to each (...) other. This thesis compares various aspects of the ideas of Milton and Hobbes with respect to religious strife and the foundations of the sovereign state. I argue that their theories represent two competing strains of modern political fit. Milton advocated resistance to political authority on the pretext of religious liberty. His political thought is an eloquent and comprehensive expression of revolutionary Protestantism, in a form which is both deeply religious and republican. Hobbes, on the other hand, sought to neutralise the potential harm posed by such religious justifications of revolution, through a new political science which set out the conditions for peaceful and commodious living. The treatment of the two thinkers is three-fold. First, their contrasting accounts of pride underlay radically opposing conceptions of the proper relations between subject, sovereign, and God. Second, Milton's interpretation of classical and Biblical views on kingship provide a theo-historical framework of his resistance to the monarchy and Long Parliament during the English civil war, culminating in his proposal for a "free commonwealth." In contrast, Hobbes advanced a doctrine of the rights and duties of sovereignty which is both less edifying and more democratic than Milton's religious republicanism. Third, their divergent conceptions of liberty in relation to law---Miltonian free will as opposed to Hobbesian regulated from---are linked to their illuminating stands on ecclesiastical authority: Milton's Protestant justification for separating church and state, and Hobbes's advocacy of the state regulation of religion alongside toleration of inward belief. (shrink)

The article regards the transformation of friendship in Hobbes’s work. From simple acceptance of the Aristotelian definition in The Whole Art of Rhetoric, Hobbes passes in the Elements to a dual approach. On one hand, he goes so far as to reaffirm the natural sociability of man solely through friendship but, on the other, he subordinates the whole question of passions to the new concept of power, which involves the redefinition of friendship as an "Instrumentall power". In Leviathan this connection (...) between "power", "honour" and "friendship" becomes tighter and tighter. Did Gassendi influence Hobbes’s shift, which was fully developed in Leviathan? Security and need are the key words in the Epicurean doctrine of friendship, and also Epicurus did not endorse the thesis of human natural sociability. The analogies with the Hobbesian doctrine are impressive . However, Gassendi was well aware of the objections raised against the too utilitarian nature of Epicurean friendship. His strategy consisted in moralizing this kind of affection and promoting a revival of Aristotle’s theory. With its insistence on the need for security and utility, it is Hobbes’s approach, therefore, that is closer to the true Epicurean doctrine of friendship. By contrast, he reacts against its apolitical character. Whereas for Epicurus and Gassendi the aim of friendship is essentially a "defense" within the context of individual ataraxia, for Hobbes friendship is a "power" that can bring about real and stable benefits only through the social contract and within a political dimension. (shrink)