New editors at Hobbes Studies

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Gabriella Slomp, Reader in Political Theory at St Andrews, is the new Editor-in-Chief at Hobbes Studies, the leading journal for research on Thomas Hobbes. For the last two years she has been the Associate Editor.

Marcus Adams, Assistant Professor of Philosophy at Albany, moves up from Assistant Editor to Associate Editor.

Juhana Lemetti is now moving on as Editor-in-Chief, after a successful tenure which saw a significant step-up for the journal. Juhana, who is on the International Advisory Board for the European Hobbes Society, took a journal that – in my view – had a rather mixed quality of publications, but which now accepts high-quality papers with great consistency. I’ve been privileged to watch this as a member of the Editorial Board of Hobbes Studies since 2013. I personally wish Juhana all the very best for the future.

Article: Hobbes’s First Cause

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Thomas Holden: ‘Hobbes’s First Cause’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 53, 4 (2015)

Abstract: Hobbes maintains that natural human reason can prove the existence of a “first cause of all causes.” But he also maintains that for all natural human reason can tell, the regress of causes might recede to infinity with no beginning at all. I argue that this apparent contradiction dissolves once we take his expressivist interpretation of religious language into account. For Hobbes, the proper function of talk about the divine attributes, including talk about its status as the “first cause of all,” is not to represent the nature of the deity, but simply to express our reverence and humility before it.