Starting from considering how radical Hobbes' rejection of teleology was, this paper presents a coherent reading of Hobbesian reason, as applied to the justification of political obligation, striking a more perspicuous third way between the ‘orthodox’ and the ‘revisionist’ readings. Both families of interpretations are partial to some elements of Hobbes' thought, therefore incapable of providing a coherent reading of its whole. A precise rendering of Hobbes' deontological reason allows a better hermeneutical understanding of his philosophy as well as a (...) keener appreciation of its relevance for past and present political thought. (shrink)

In this article I introduce the notion of crucial evidence and I use it to shed light on an ongoing scholarly controversy in Hobbes studies, namely whether Hobbes holds a prudential or a deontological theory of contractual obligation. Even though there is important evidence for both readings, I argue that there is crucial evidence for interpreting Hobbes’s account in a deontological fashion.

The aim of this paper is to critically review the game-theoretic discussion of Hobbes and to develop a game-theoretic interpretation that gives due attention both to Hobbes's distinction between “moderates” and “dominators” and to what actually initiates conflict in the state of nature, namely, the competition for vital goods. As can be shown, Hobbes's state of nature contains differently structured situations of choice, the game-theoretic representation of which requires the prisoner's dilemma and the assurance game and the so-called assurance dilemma. (...) However, the “state of war” ultimately emerges from situations that cannot be described by any of these games because they represent zero-sum games in which the outcome of mutual cooperation does not exist. (shrink)

In this paper, I attempt to defend an older, non-normative approach to Hobbes's philosophy. I argue, against recent theories that maintain Hobbes's philosophy contains a normative theory of human behavior “which prescribes proper or morally permissible modes of action both within civil society and outside it”, that Hobbesian natural right and natural law are not normative postulates of a moral theory of political obligation but, rather, were considered by Hobbes to be, in the case of natural right, empirically verifiable hypotheses (...) about human nature, and in the case of the laws of nature, nothing more than rationally consistent principles of natural self-interest, or the logic of natural right, based on the principles of Hobbes's physics and psychology. (shrink)