Hobbes Studies Essay Competition 2018

Hobbes Studies is pleased to invite submissions to the 2018 Hobbes Studies Essay Competition. Submissions should treat the philosophical, political, historical, literary, religious, or scientific aspects of the thought of Thomas Hobbes and be no more than 10,000 words. Essays are invited from researchers in any field who are currently enrolled in postgraduate study or completed their PhD no earlier than 3rd March 2013. Submissions must be received by 30 May 2018. The judges reserve the right not to make an award.

All submissions should be uploaded to the journal’s Editorial Manager website: http://www.editorialmanager.com/hobs/default.aspx. When submitting your manuscript for consideration, please note in the comments box that you desire to be considered for the 2018 competition (immediately before uploading the files), and include your CV. Submissions must follow Hobbes Studies submission guidelines. For questions, please email the Assistant Editor at hobbesstudies@gmail.com. Essays must not have been previously published or simultaneously submitted for consideration elsewhere.

Submissions will be considered for publication in a forthcoming issue of Hobbes Studies. The competition submission selected by the Editorial Board will be published in Hobbes Studies, awarded €350, and receive a year’s subscription. The 2017 prize winning essay was ‘”A State of Lesser Hope”: The Servant in Hobbes’s Natural Commonwealth’ by Caleb Miller, which will be published  in the Autumn issue  of Hobbes Studies.

To download a copy of the competition advertisement, please click here (pdf).

About the Journal

Hobbes Studies is an international, peer-reviewed scholarly journal. It publishes research (articles, book symposia, research notes and book reviews) about philosophical, political historical, literary, religious, and scientific aspects of Thomas Hobbes’s thought. For previous issues, and further information see www.brill.com/hobbes-studies.

Second EHS Biennial Conference (Amsterdam, May 14-16, 2018)

Provisional programme:

Monday 14th May, 2018

09:30-10:00 Welcome and registration, with coffee and pastries
10:00-10:15 Opening talk by the organisers

Session 1:
10:15-11:15 Deborah Baumgold (Oregon) – ‘Dating On the Citizen’
11:25-12:25 Kinch Hoekstra & Nicholas Gooding (UC Berkeley) – ‘Hobbes’s philosophical anthropology: natural sociability’
12:25-13:45 Lunch, served in the Main Library

Session 2:
13:45-14:45 Susanne Sreedhar (Boston University) – ‘The right of nature and the right to all things’
14:55-15:55 Michael LeBuffe (Otago) – ‘Motivation and the good’

Session 3: 
16:15-17:15 Laurens van Apeldoorn (Leiden) – ‘Rex est Populus’: the sovereign and the state’
17:15-17:45 General meeting of the European Hobbes Society (optional)
19:00 Conference dinner, venue TBA

Tuesday 15th May

Session 4:
10:00-11:00 Sophie Smith (Oxford) – ‘Hobbes’s theory of the state: civitas, respublica, and On the Citizen’
11:10-12:10 Michael J. Green (Pomona) – ‘Personation, authorization, and group agency in On the Citizen’
12:10-13:30 Lunch, served in the Main Library

Session 5:
13:30-14:30 Johann P. Sommerville (Wisconsin-Madison) – ‘On the Citizen’s views on religion and church-state relations in historical context’
14:40-15:40 A.P. Martinich (Texas) – ‘Sovereign-making and biblical covenants’

Session 6:
16:00-17:00 Thomas Holden (USCB) – ‘Religious passions’
17:10-18:10 Alison McQueen (Stanford) – ‘Hobbes’s scriptural arguments in On the Citizen’
19:00 Informal dinner, venue TBA

Wednesday 16th May

Session 7:
9:30-10:30 Rosemarie Wagner (UC Berkeley) – ‘Legal obligation and punishment in On the Citizen’
10:40-11:40 Ioannis Evrigenis (Tufts) – ‘The political economy of On the Citizen’
11:50-12:50 S.A. Lloyd (USC) – ‘Sociability and motivation in On the Citizen’
13:00 Concluding lunch; venue TBA

The conference is generously supported by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, the Amsterdam Centre for Political Thought (ACPT) and the Challenges to Democratic Representation Research Group at the University of Amsterdam.

For further information or queries please contact the conference convenors:

Johan Olsthoorn (Amsterdam/Leuven): j.c.a.olsthoorn@uva.nl

Eva Odzuck (Erlangen-Nürnberg): eva.odzuck@fau.de

Robin Douglass (King’s College London) robin.douglass@kcl.ac.uk

Obituary: Glen Newey (1961-2017)

Sadly, Glen Newey passed away after a boating accident in Rotterdam on Saturday 30 September.

Glen was a good friend of the European Hobbes Society, attending and speaking at the Leuven conference in March 2013, and the Leiden conference in September 2015. He was a genuinely European scholar, moving from Keele University in the UK, to Brussels, then Leiden, where he was Professor of Political Philosophy and Ethics.

On top of his pioneering work on political realism, he is best known in Hobbes circles for the Routledge Guidebook to Hobbes’ Leviathan (2nd edition, 2014). He also wrote chapters on Hobbes in Yoke-Lian Lee, ed., The Politics of Gender (2010) and Raia Prokhovnik and Gabriella Slomp, eds., International Political Theory After Hobbes (2011).

CFP: Hobbes after Leviathan: Beyond Leviathan? (Padova, Feb 15-16, 2018)

Papers are invited on Thomas Hobbes’s later writings (after 1651, with particular attention to Dialogue, Behemoth, and the Latin version of Leviathan), especially (but not exclusively) on the following topics:

– Political Theory
– Legal Theory and Legal History
– Images of History
– Theology

The papers will be discussed at a workshop to be held 15-16 February 2018 at the University of Padova, by the Department of Political Science, Law and International Relationships (SPGI), the Department of Historical and Geographic Sciences and the Ancient World (DiSSGeA), and the Departement of Philosophy, Sociology, Pedagogy and Applied Psychology (FISPPA), under the auspices of the European Hobbes Society.

Keynote lectures:

PATRICIA SPRINGBORG (Humboldt Universität zu Berlin)
LUC FOISNEAU (EHESS-CNRS, Paris)

Format of the workshop:
Papers will be pre-circulated. There is an hour for the discussion of each, divided as follows:
• Five minutes for the author to introduce their paper. It is assumed that those attend-ing have read the paper in advance.
• A short (five-ten minutes) response from an allocated respondent.
• Brief opportunity for the author to reply.
• Questions.
IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO PRESENT A PAPER, PLEASE SEND A TITLE AND A SHORT ABSTRACT (NO MORE THAN 250 WORDS) BY FRIDAY 8TH DECEMBER 2017 TO MAURO.FARNESICAMELLONE@UNIPD.IT

We ask that papers are ready for circulation by Wednesday 31th January 2018 to enable at-tendees to read them in advance.
The attendance at the conference is completely free for everybody (no conference fee).
The Conference Committee:
Mauro Farnesi Camellone, Giovanni Fiaschi, Maurizio Merlo, Mario Piccinini

Conference announcement: Thomas Hobbes and Peace (Edinburgh, 8/9 June)

Thomas Hobbes and Peace
Event date:
Thursday 8 June to Friday 9 June
Location:
Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities, 2 Hope Park Square, EH8 9NW
An IASH/Susan Manning Workshop organised in cooperation with the European Hobbes Society

The programme will begin at 9.30am on the first day and finish no later than 3pm on the second day. Speakers and discussants will be invited for dinner at a nearby restaurant in the evening of the first day.

Thomas Hobbes is sometimes deemed to be a “philosopher of peace” and remains an important reference point in debates on this subject. His name is invoked in discussions about peace across political theory, international relations theory, peace and conflict studies, and the literature on transitional justice. Hobbes is often seen as a standard bearer of the idea of a coercively induced “negative peace”, which consists of the mere absence of war. Such a condition is contrasted with a “positive peace”, which is realised in a just society. Hobbes is also associated with a misleading dichotomy between conditions of war and peace, which may obscure practices of violence during times of “peace”. Moreover, scholars continue to attribute to him the view that there could be no lasting international peace, because states remain in a “state of war” towards one another. The objective of this interdisciplinary workshop is to question standard interpretations of Hobbes’s political thought by reassessing his ideas on peace from a variety of perspectives.

The workshop features papers by Deborah Baumgold (Oregon), Signy Gutnick Allen (York), Glen Newey (Leiden), Johan Olsthoorn (Leuven), Gabriella Slomp (St Andrews), and Patricia Springborg (HU Berlin). In addition, Maximilian Jaede (Edinburgh) will present parts of his book manuscript titled Thomas Hobbes’s Proto-Liberal Conception of Peace.

The workshop format has been chosen in order to facilitate an intensive discussion among scholars with interests in Hobbes’s conception of peace, its place in the history of political thought, and its reception today. Speakers are encouraged to circulate their papers by 1st June among the registered attendants. In this way, papers do not need to be presented at length at the workshop, maximising the time for an in-depth discussion of each contribution. An allocated respondent will provide comments on each paper, followed by questions and discussion.

Attendance is free of charge but advance registration is required, as refreshments will be served throughout the day. If you wish to attend please email Max Jaede at maximilian.jaede@ed.ac.uk

Lecture Series: War and Peace in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy

A lecture series on “War and Peace in Hobbes’s Political Philosophy” will take place at the University of Erlangen-Nürnberg, Kollegienhaus KH. 2.012, Universitätsstraße 15, 91054 Erlangen, Germany.
In eight lectures, international experts (including Kinch Hoekstra, Peter Schröder and Patricia Springborg) alongside younger scholars will discuss Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy and his notions of war and peace.
Questions which will be discussed are:
Is Hobbes a “Prince of Peace”? Is the title of “realist” correct to describe the complexity of his political philosophy? What kind of peace can we find in Hobbes, and what are its psychological preconditions? What kind of arguments and literary techniques does Hobbes use for his philosophical and his political goals? Is his translation of Thucydides a mere translation?
Attendance is free but registration is recommended. You are welcome to attend only some of the lectures.  If you would like to join us for dinner after a lecture, please let us know, so that we can adjust our reservations. For any further questions please contact Eva.Odzuck@fau.de.
Please find all information in this pdf.

hobbeslectures

First Biennial Conference of the European Hobbes Society

“Of all Discourse, governed by desire of Knowledge, there is at last an End,

either by attaining, or by giving over. And in the chain of Discourse,

wheresoever it be interrupted, there is an End for that time.”

Hobbes, Leviathan, vii.1

 

From 20-22 Sept 2016, 25 scholars, based in 10 different countries, came together in the cosy college town of Leuven, Belgium, for the first biennial conference of the European Hobbes Society. It was a joy to see quite a few new faces amidst many familiar ones. With much judgment and wit, and some fancy, we discussed ten new papers, covering a range of aspects of Hobbes’s thought. The two splendid keynote speeches were delivered by Deborah Baumgold and S.A. Lloyd. While our academic discussions have not quite ended, at the conference, a resolute and final sentence was cast on our constitution, which was judiciously adopted by universal acclaim.

The full program can be found here.

We are very grateful to the magnanimous Fritz Thyssen Stiftung for having made possible this conference. Thanks also goes out to all participants, both for the fine social and intellectual virtues which they have brought to bear on the event, and for helping us relocate the conference to KU Leuven at short notice.

As the title of the conference boldly announced, we aspire to organise a larger conference every two years. We look forward to setting up smaller workshops, panels, and lectures series in the meantime, and we much encourage and support you to do the same. Our dialogue has not concluded, it has merely been interrupted.

Foto 21.09.16, 16 24 43 Foto 21.09.16, 18 09 35 Foto 22.09.16, 11 15 07

Workshop on Arash Abizadeh’s manuscript

On June 17th, several members of the European Hobbes Society met to discuss a draft of Arash Abizadeh’s important, book-length analysis of Hobbes’s moral philosophy. Abizadeh’s manuscript incisively combines rigorous textual interpretation with powerful philosophical analysis to cast new light on Hobbes’s ethics and meta-ethics. The workshop covered numerous features of the book, from fine details of interpretating Hobbes to broader issues of framing.

We then discussed a draft paper by Signy Gutnick Allen which offers a penetrating analysis of Hobbes’s theory of the right to punish.

Those present, from left to right in the picture above, were Adrian Blau (King’s College London), Elad Carmel (Oxford), Robin Douglass (King’s College London), Deborah Baumgold (Oregon), Arash Abizadeh (McGill), Signy Gutnick Allen (Queen Mary, University of London), and Paul Sagar (Cambridge).