Hobbes is often portrayed as a thinker who anticipated modern constructivist ideas of fiction and representation according to which reality is simply a social construction. This article questions t...

The last‐half of seventeenth‐century England witnessed an increasing number of works published questioning the traditional notions of God's work of creation and providence. Ascribing agency to matter, motion, chance, and fortune, thinkers ranging from Hobbes, Spinoza, modern‐Epicureans, and other presented a challenge to the Anglican defenders of social and ecclesiastical order. By examining the genesis of the Boyle Lectures that began in 1692 with a bequest from Robert Boyle, we can see that while the Lecturers—three of whom will be examined (...) in detail (Richard Bentley, John Harris, and William Whiston)—assiduously defended classical notions of the God–world relationship, they did so without a great sense of panic or pessimism. This transitional period in the mode of conflict or concord between religion and science sheds interesting lights on matters such as argument from design, biogenesis without purposive, personal agents, and scriptural exegesis and scientific inquiries. (shrink)

ABSTRACT For Victoria Kahn, Hobbes' argument that fear of violent death is “the passion to be reckoned upon” in explaining what inclines men to peace must be interpreted as a mimetic argument. However, Kahn then notes a paradox that makes Hobbes' thinking problematic: whereas love and the desires are appetites that produce an imitative effect, fear is different. Though also a passion, fear lacks that capacity to produce a mimetic effect or, therefore, to generate a contract. My hypothesis is that (...) resolving the dilemma presented in Kahn's interpretation of Hobbes requires a shift in attention from mimesis to rhetoric and, more specifically, to biological rhetoric as defined by Nancy Struever. This approach to Hobbes makes it possible to understand the rhetorical role of fear in generating and maintaining the social contract, and how the problem that Kahn signals—the impotence of fear in relation to mimesis—can be resolved. (shrink)