Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2024-07-30DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10077
Robin Douglass
{"title":"Archibald Campbell, Critic of Hobbes","authors":"Robin Douglass","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10077","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10077","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In the 1733 edition of <em>An Enquiry into the Original of Moral Virtue</em>, Archibald Campbell added two lengthy discussions of Thomas Hobbes’s views on human nature and sociability. Taken together, these constitute what is probably the most detailed engagement with Hobbes’s thought in the early decades of the eighteenth century, at least amongst British moral philosophers. This article reconstructs and analyses Campbell’s criticisms of Hobbes. In particular, it shows how Campbell responds to the opening chapter of <em>De Cive</em> – where Hobbes had famously denied “that Man is an Animal born fit for Society” – by maintaining that the desire of esteem, or honour, is in fact evidence that humans are naturally sociable creatures. In examining Hobbes’s account of human conflict, Campbell further argues that what Hobbes took to be features of our natural condition arise only once our desire of esteem is corrupted within civil societies.</p>","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"77 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141869026","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2024-05-11DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10072
Amy Chandran
{"title":"Transubstantiation, Absurdity, and the Religious Imagination: Hobbes and Rational Christianity","authors":"Amy Chandran","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10072","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10072","url":null,"abstract":"This article evaluates the political implications of Thomas Hobbes’s extensive treatment of religion by taking up the motif of the Eucharist (and accompanying doctrine of transubstantiation) in <jats:italic>Leviathan</jats:italic>. Hobbes holds out transubstantiation as an exemplar of absurdity and an historical outgrowth of Christianity’s inauspicious meeting with pagan practices. At the same time, <jats:italic>Leviathan</jats:italic> contains allusions to eucharistic imagery in its narration of the generation of the “Mortal God,” the commonwealth, as the incorporation of a civil body. These conflicting sentiments are illustrative of a wider tension running through Hobbes’s thought. Although Hobbes’s repudiation of superstition is well-known, it stands in stark contrast to <jats:italic>Leviathan’</jats:italic>s treatment of Christianity as an exemplar of “true” religion. The varied allusions to eucharistic doctrine illustrate how proper use might be made of a persistent “natural religiosity.” Both in its consonance with reason and its political logic, Christianity remains a politically constructive expression of “power invisible.”","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140926452","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2024-04-12DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10074
Timothy Stanton, Tim Stuart-Buttle
{"title":"Hobbes, Locke, and the Christian Commonwealth","authors":"Timothy Stanton, Tim Stuart-Buttle","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10074","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10074","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Locke refrained from engaging explicitly with Hobbes in any of his writings. Locke’s policy of non-engagement should be interpreted, we argue, neither as evidence of his lack of interest in (or ignorance of) Hobbes’s arguments, nor as an attempt to conceal from the uninitiated Locke’s covert Hobbesian commitments. Locke’s silence reveals rather than conceals. What it reveals is an absolute determination to “distinguish between the business of civil government and that of religion, and to mark the true bounds between them”. Approached in this way, precisely because Locke’s account of the “business of civil government” says nothing about ecclesiastical government, the second of <em>Two Treatises</em> can be read, in its entirety, as a powerful critical response to Hobbes. To see why, it is necessary to grasp that Part <span style=\"font-variant: small-caps;\">iii</span> of <em>Leviathan</em> (“Of a Christian Common-wealth”) is integral to Hobbes’s positive argumentative purposes in the work.</p>","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"52 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-12","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140597585","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2024-04-11DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10073
Timothy Stanton, Tim Stuart-Buttle
{"title":"Hobbes and Locke: Meaning, Method, Modernity: Introduction","authors":"Timothy Stanton, Tim Stuart-Buttle","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10073","url":null,"abstract":"<p>An introduction to the special issue on Hobbes and Locke: Meaning, Method, Modernity.</p>","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"59 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":1.2,"publicationDate":"2024-04-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140597496","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-17DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10070
Deborah Baumgold
{"title":"A Note from the Editor","authors":"Deborah Baumgold","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10070","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"28 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-17","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136038222","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-11DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10065
S.A. Lloyd
{"title":"A Hobbesian Method for Establishing the Absurdity of Injustice Without Reliance on Hobbes’s Temporal Arguments","authors":"S.A. Lloyd","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10065","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10065","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The paper investigates Hobbes’s arguments that injustice is a kind of absurdity involving a “contradiction properly so called,” concluding that although those arguments are undermined by their reliance on a mistaken temporality assumption, Hobbes’s philosophy provides other means for establishing his desired conclusion.","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"56 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136252526","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-11DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10066
S.A. Lloyd
{"title":"Research Note: Current Scholarship and Future Directions in Hobbes Studies","authors":"S.A. Lloyd","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10066","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10066","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Today the study of Hobbes is both reputable and flourishing, to judge by the numbers in recent years of publications, submissions, conferences, workshops, and sessions at professional meetings devoted to Hobbes, along with growing interest from scholars in China and Latin America. I recently conducted a survey of colleagues working on Hobbes; a non-scientific survey, it included scholars working in a variety of departments. This research note reports the views of more than three dozen respondents, who answered three questions: (1) what has been at stake in Hobbes debates?; (2) have any conclusions been decisively established?; and (3) what are the open questions for the future? The answers evidence a lack of consensus but also demonstrate that we have increasingly refined and sophisticated theoretical arguments for and against contending positions.","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"10 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136252225","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-11DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10069
Allan Gabriel Cardoso dos Santos
{"title":"Thomas Hobbes’ Invisible Things","authors":"Allan Gabriel Cardoso dos Santos","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10069","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Hobbes argues that among the reasons for the Catholic Church’s power is the difficulty for ignorant people to understand the causes of natural phenomena. They take the motion of invisible bodies for the intervention of incorporeal agents. For Hobbes, the Church tries to perpetuate this profitable misunderstanding by spreading Scholastic doctrines supporting this idea in the sermons of all the parishes of the Christian world. Existing literature, thus far, focused almost exclusively on Hobbes’ negative claim concerning incorporeal substances, i.e., that they are absurd and are only used to justify the Church’s claim to power. On the other hand, his positive proposition to replace immaterial substances with invisible bodies was not fully explored. By highlighting Hobbes’ examination of invisibility in Leviathan , it is possible to demonstrate how he uses ideas from natural philosophy to challenge some of the dominant Scholastic doctrines and, consequently, the usurpation of the sovereign’s ecclesiastical power.","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"59 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136252525","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-10DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10067
José Médina
{"title":"Dictionnaire des philosophes français du XVIIe siècle: Acteurs et réseaux du savoir, written by de Delphine Bellis, Luc Foisneau et Claire Gallie","authors":"José Médina","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10067","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10067","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"70 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136357823","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hobbes StudiesPub Date : 2023-10-10DOI: 10.1163/18750257-bja10068
Daniel J. Kapust
{"title":"Plague and the Leviathan","authors":"Daniel J. Kapust","doi":"10.1163/18750257-bja10068","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1163/18750257-bja10068","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Building on a number of recent studies that have turned to Hobbes in light of covid -19, I explore the context of Hobbes’ own encounters with plague while at Oxford, along with efforts to mitigate plague by the regime of James I. I then explore what role his encounters with plague may have played as he wrote his philosophical masterpiece, Leviathan .","PeriodicalId":42474,"journal":{"name":"Hobbes Studies","volume":"77 1","pages":"0"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-10-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"136358388","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}