Language was central to Hobbes's understanding of human beings and their mental abilities, and criticism of other philosophers' uses of language became a favorite critical tool for him. This paper connects Hobbes's theories about language to his criticisms of others' language, examining Hobbes's theories of propositions and truth, and how they relate to his claims that various sorts of proposition are absurd. It considers whether Hobbes in fact means anything more by 'absurd' than 'false'. And it pays particular attention to (...) Hobbes's categorization of causes of absurdity and of types of incoherent proposition, arguing that Hobbes's approach is only loosely related to later discussions of category mistakes. (shrink)

Within the paradigm of political liberalism, Hobbes’s legal philosophy has the peculiarity that individual property rights are treated as conditional and derived from the State’s absolute property rights, and thus common, State and individual property are explicitly recognised as three different juridical realities. Through determining the place that Hobbes’s few references to common property hold within his legal philosophy, it is possible to turn the thought of this classic author into a very useful theoretical tool for thinking the possibilities and (...) limits of a political strategy betting for common property against State property. (shrink)

According to a common reading of Thomas Hobbes, fear is the most philosophically important passion, responsible for the founding and sustaining of the commonwealth. I argue that this common reading is incorrect by focusing on the necessary and important role of hope in human action as well as in the founding and sustaining of the commonwealth. Life in the Hobbesian commonwealth, on the reading defended in this paper, is less fearful and more hopeful than scholars have noticed.

The status of the laws of nature in Hobbes’s Leviathan has been a continual point of disagreement among scholars. Many agree that since Hobbes claims that civil philosophy is a science, the answer lies in an understanding of the nature of Hobbesian science more generally. In this paper, I argue that Hobbes’s view of the construction of geometrical figures sheds light upon the status of the laws of nature. In short, I claim that the laws play the same role as (...) the component parts – what Hobbes calls the “cause” – of geometrical figures. To make this argument, I show that in both geometry and civil philosophy, Hobbes proceeds by a method of synthetic demonstration as follows: 1) offering a thought experiment by privation; 2) providing definitions by explication of “simple conceptions” within the thought experiment; and 3) formulating generative definitions by making use of those definitions by explication. In just the same way that Hobbes says that the geometer should “put together” the parts of a square to learn its cause, I argue that the laws of nature are the cause of peace. (shrink)

Hobbes repeatedly expressed concerns about moral and political language, e.g., about the bad consequences of various uses and misuses of language. He did not simply focus on the consequences though. He also attempted to understand the problems, using the central semantic notion in his philosophy of language, signification. Hobbes, in both the Elements of Law and Leviathan, argues that a wide variety of terms – including ‘good’, ‘bad’, and the names of virtues and vices – have a double and inconstant (...) signification. This paper explores and explains that theory of Hobbes's. (In the course of the discussion, two other interpretations of Hobbes's claims are discussed: Pettit’s discussion in terms of indexicals, and Alexandra’s in terms of sense and reference.) This phenomenon is, Hobbes thinks, pervasive in our use of moral and political language. Indeed he says his analysis applies to all “names of such things as affect us, that is, which please, and displease us” (Leviathan 4.24), which seems a very broad category indeed. This inconstancy of signification has considerable potential to cause confusion and conflict. Given those practical consequences, it is of some importance for Hobbes to find a solution to this problem. The paper examines several possible Hobbesian solutions to the problem. There is, however, reason to think that these suggested solutions cannot completely solve the problem. The paper concludes, then, by arguing that double and inconstant signification would always be a danger, even in a properly constituted Hobbesian commonwealth. (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 the seventeenth century, the concept of natural law was linked with that of “innate ideas”. Natural laws were said to be ideas imprinted by nature or by God on men's minds and were the very foundation of religion and morality. Locke's attack on innate ideas in the first book of his Essay Concerning Human Understanding is therefore considered to be an assault on natural law. Modern critics like Peter Laslett, W. von Leyden and Philip Abrams are of the opinion (...) that Locke's critique of innate ideas in the Essay cannot be reconciled with the concept of natural law in the Two Treatises of Government. (shrink)

The conventional portrait of Thomas Hobbes that emerged in twentieth century histories of philosophy is that of the quintessential mechanical philosopher, who openly broke with philosophical tradition (together with René Descartes). Hobbes’s scholars depicted a more correct and detailed panorama, by analyzing Hobbes’s debt towards Aristotelian and Renaissance traditions, as well as the problematic nature of the epistemological status that Hobbes attributes to natural philosophy. However, Hobbes’s connection to modern Galilean science remains problematic. How and in what way did Hobbes (...) take inspiration from Galileo? In this article, I analyze Hobbes’s natural philosophy by addressing three topics: (1) his connection with some aspects of seventeenth-century Aristotelianism; (2) differences and analogies between Hobbes’s and Galileo’s epistemological approaches; and (3) the Galilean foundation of Hobbes’s philosophy. Through this analysis I want to show in which sense Hobbes can be properly defined a “Galilean philosopher”. (shrink)

According to Hobbes, individuals care about their relative standing in a way that shapes their social interactions. To model this aspect of Hobbesian psychology, this paper supposes that agents have social preferences, that is, preferences about their comparative resource holdings. Introducing uncertainty regarding the social preferences of others unleashes a process of trust-unravelling, ultimately leading to Hobbes’s ‘state of war’. This Trust-unravelling Model incorporates important features of Hobbes’s argument that past models ignore.

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

La siguiente propuesta de lectura es, en muchos sentidos, el resultado del encuentro con la obra de Norberto Bobbio. Este pensador italiano se dedicó a estudiar a los clásicos de la filosofía política y, entre ellos, especialmente a Thomas Hobbes, y fue. mostrando, de un modo cada vez más convincente, la presencia de la obra de: Hobbes en el desarrollo de la filosofía política moderna, hasta el punto de considerarla: como el gran modelo que reemplaza ala tradición aristotélica. Su tesis (...) es muy clara: ese modelo está formado por un con- junto de conceptos en cuya estructuración predomina la racionalidad; en ese modelo existe un doble y compatible camino intelectual: el de la fundamentación racional del Estado y el de la fundamentación de un Estado racional. Estas fórmulas han tenido mucho éxito en el campo de la historiografía, pero creemos que pueden modificarse sustantivamente si se muestra que el peso fundamental del pensamiento político de Hobbes recae no sólo en la razón sino también, y antes que nada, en la imaginación. Es precisamente el sentido básico de ese descubrimiento el que nos ha llevado, distanciados de Bobbio, a proponer el presente estudio. (shrink)

As Spinoza presents it, the knowledge of God is knowledge, primarily, of oneself and, secondarily, of other things. Without this know‐ledge, a mind may not consciously desire to persevere in being. That is why Spinoza claims that the knowledge of God is the most useful thing to the mind at IVP28. He claims that the knowledge of God is the highest good, however, not because it is instrumental to perseverance, but because it is also the best among those goods that (...) we seek for their own sakes. It is acquiescentia in se ipso, the highest form of laetitia. (shrink)

J D Marshall; Thomas Hobbes: education and obligation in the Commonwealth, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 14, Issue 2, 30 May 2006, Pages 193–203, h.

The paper addresses the topic of the unavoidability of contradiction in dealing with issues of scepticism – and how coherence can be restored to sceptical arguments and texts. It considers six classic paradoxes in the history of Western thought – of how language works to undermine and derail the coherence of thought. It also theorizes a philosophy of language approach to restore coherence in the classic instances discussed. As its major example, the paper explores how and why the image of (...) successful, long-standing constitutions is a minimalist image through a discussion of the relationship between epistemological scepticism generally and textual scepticism specifically. (shrink)

How can citizens construct the political authority under which they will live? I argue that Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) answers this question concerning the constitutive power of political and normative agency by employing four dimensions of mimesis from the Greek and Roman traditions. And I argue that mimesis accounts for the know-how, or power/knowledge, the general ‘man’ draws upon in constructing the commonwealth. Hobbes revalues poetic mimesis through his stylistic decisions, including the invitation to the reader to read ‘himself’ in (...) the portrait of the general man depicted in the text. Hobbes aims for Leviathan to change the ethical dispositions of its readers, turning them from bad to good men as they witness the general man undergoing this ethical transformation in the transition from the state of nature to the civil state. He emphasizes the anthropological dimension of mimesis to explain political disorder since he argues that men assess the honor others attribute them by observing signs and gestures in others’ behavior. Hobbes employs the linguistic dimension of mimesis to describe how men acting as agents can build a normative consensus out of the state of nature. This article positions mimesis as a key term for understanding the intersection between aesthetics and politics before the term ‘aesthetics’ came into parlance. (shrink)

Hobbes’ natural law theory has been discussed far and wide. Some interpreters ended up defining Hobbes as a natural law theorist, some others as a legal positivist. In this paper, I analyse the work of two important scholars, Howard Warrender and Norberto Bobbio, whose insights have stimulated an interesting debate about Hobbes’ political theory. Warrender gives God a central function in Hobbes’ political science. On his account, God is a lawmaker, his will is the source of a universal obligation, and (...) civil order is necessary to give force to the natural law that is the expression of divine will. In Bobbio’s interpretation, Hobbes is the first legal positivist of Modern age, as natural law is only ever given content by the sovereign’s will. Finally, I ask which is natural law and God’s function in Hobbes’ political thought, questioning some contemporary scholars in order to clarify Hobbes’ modernity. (shrink)