After the question “how could Hobbes write the natural law, if it is nowritten law?” I’ll try to approach the relationship between natural and civil law after the instauration of the commonwealth. In this sense, I’ll pay attention to the hobbesian distinction among “written law” and “written register” of law and a few consequences after this distinction. For example, if, how Hobbes says, the correct interpretation of natural law doesn’t depend on philosophers, but only on the authority of commonwealth, would (...) include itself the legitimation of the formulation of the natural laws? The paradox of the first question seems to be important, however, negligenced from hobbesian critical literature. Its intent is to investigate this negligence into better understanding his philosophical postulate, that includes important points like the “silence of law”, the right of self-defense, foro interno and foro externo, State and government. (shrink)

In this work I argue an interpretation on Thomas Hobbes’s thought and its relation with international law. Several scholars argue that Hobbes reject the international law. Nevertheless, I will prove that it is possible to find a legal theory on international law in his works, if it takes to account the historical context and the peculiarities of global order in the Modern Age. In this way it is possible to understand why Carl Schmitt said that Hobbes was one of the (...) founders of Ius Publicum Europaeum, sentence that the German jurist did not prove. My aim is to locate Thomas Hobbes into the History of Legal International Ideas. (shrink)

A discrição da presença do princípio de reciprocidade na formulação hobbesiana oblitera importantes dimensões na sua teoria. Entre estas, a necessidade intrínseca de que os súditos estejam instados a utilizar a sua capacidade de produzir juízos. Apresentam-se diversas circunstâncias que corroboram essa tese, o que mostra que a atividade de julgar não foi confiscada pelo soberano. Ao contrário, ela é mesmo necessária para o seu sistema.

This article reassesses Hobbes’s place in the history of ethics based on the first systematic analysis of his various classifications of formal goodness. The good was traditionally divided into three: profitably good, pleasurably good, and morally good. Across his works, Hobbes replaced the last with pulchrum—a decidedly non-moral form of goodness on his account. I argue that Hobbes’s dismissal of moral goodness was informed by his hedonist conception of the good and accompanied by reinterpretations of right reason and natural law. (...) By dispensing moral goodness and insisting on the hedonist and relational nature of the good, Hobbes moreover recast and rendered more urgent the question of why we should be moral. Hobbes is commonly thought to have raised this question so starkly because of his general insensitivity to the demands of justice. My analysis suggests that it may also, or rather, have been due to his restrictive conception of the good. A comparison with other moral philosophers from the period—including Suárez, Gassendi, Locke, and Pufendorf—indicates how unusual Hobbes’s jettisoning of moral goodness was. (shrink)