Chapter: ‘Thomas Hobbes Against the Aristotelian Account of the Virtues and His Renaissance Source Lorenzo Valla’

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Gianni Paganini: ‘Thomas Hobbes Against the Aristotelian Account of the Virtues and His Renaissance Source Lorenzo Valla’, in Cecilia Muratori and Gianni Paganini, eds.,  Early Modern Philosophers and the Renaissance Legacy, Springer, 2016, pp. 221-37.

Abstract: This chapter concentrates on the “ethicist” interpretation of Hobbes’s theory of morals, considering whether and how a more historical and contextual approach could confirm or disconfirm this sort of reading of Hobbes. In this connection, it will be shown that knowledge of Hobbes’s Renaissance sources, first of all Valla, can help us to avoid not only historical but also philosophical misunderstandings, such as dismissing Hobbes’s objections to the Aristotelian theory of virtues. For his scientific approach to ethics that excludes the doctrine of mesótes, for his stressing the value of pleasure and self-preservation, for his criticism of the classic and Renaissance concept of “glory”, Hobbes reveals himself to have been influenced much more by Valla’s similar topics than by Aristotle’s approach, as Leo Strauss in the past and more recently Boonin-Vail and Ewin thought.

 

Article: Hobbes on Mind: Practical Deliberation, Reasoning, and Language

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Arash Abizadeh: ‘Hobbes on Mind: Practical Deliberation, Reasoning, and Language’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 55 (2017), pp. 1-34.

Abstract: Readers of Hobbes usually take his account of practical deliberation to be a passive process that does not respond to agents’ judgments about what normative reasons they have. This is ostensibly because deliberation is purely conative and/ or excludes reasoning, or because Hobbesian reasoning is itself a process in which reasoners merely experience a succession of mental states. I argue that, for Hobbes, deliberation (the basis for voluntary action) is not purely conative and among humans it involves reasoning. Furthermore, while non-linguistic reasoning is passive, specifically linguistic reasoning is an active process in which reasoners affirm propositions from which they reason. The historical significance of Hobbes’s account of agency lies in his attempt, by appealing to the artificial tool of language, to weld a materialist determinism to a cognitive account of practical deliberation that can involve reasoning and be reason-responsive.

Article: Glory and the law in Hobbes

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Tracy B. Strong: ‘Glory and the law in Hobbes’, European Journal of Political Theory, 16 (2016), pp. 61-76.

Abstract: A central argument of the Leviathan has to do with the political importance of education. Hobbes wants his book to be taught in universities and expounded much in the manner that Scripture was. Only thus will citizens realize what is in their hearts as to the nature of good political order. Glory affects this process in two ways. The pursuit of glory by a citizen leads to political chaos and disorder. On the other hand, God’s glory is such that one can do nothing but acquiesce to it. The Hobbesian sovereign shares some of the effects of glory that God has naturally; this, however, has to be supplemented by awe and fear.

New article: ‘From many kings to a single one: Hobbesian absolutism disguised as an epic translation’

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Andrea Catanzaro: History of Political Thought, 37 (2016), pp. 658-85.

Abstract: The article deals with the relevance of Hobbes’s translations of Homer’s Poems from the perspective of Political Thought. These translations, made by the philosopher in the last years of his life, have also been considered to be a sort of ‘continuation of Leviathan by others means’. Starting from here, the article, based on a comparative lexical analysis of the original Greek and English texts, aims to highlight three of these ‘means’ Hobbes uses to disseminate his political theory in a period during which he could not write freely because of censorship.

New article: ‘”Strange and deformed births” in Hobbes’s Civil Science’

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Jared Lucky: ‘”Strange and deformed births” in Hobbes’s Civil Science’, History of Political Thought, 37 (2016), pp. 630-57.

Abstract: Deformed births have troubled philosophers, judges and clerics for millennia. But beyond the medical, philosophical and theological concerns with monsters lurks a deeper political question: what human power can be entrusted to define the very word ‘human’? Perhaps no thinker understood this challenge better, or earlier, than Thomas Hobbes. Setting Hobbes’s treatment of ‘monstrous’ births in the context of intellectual history, I aim to highlight its significance for his whole civil philosophy. Repudiating both ‘Aristotle and the philosophers’ and the sensational accounts of monsters that circulated in his own day, Hobbes incorporated monstrous births into his argument for the Sovereign: an authority charged not only with ruling men, but defining them.

New book: Mere Civility

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Teresa M. Bejan: Mere Civility: Disagreement and the Limits of Toleration, Harvard University Press, 2017

About this book: Today, politicians and intellectuals warn that we face a crisis of civility and a veritable war of words polluting our public sphere. In liberal democracies committed to tolerating diversity as well as active, often heated disagreement, the loss of this conversational virtue appears critical. But is civility really a virtue? Or is it, as critics claim, a covert demand for conformity that silences dissent?

Mere Civility sheds light on our predicament and the impasse between “civilitarians” and their opponents by examining early modern debates about religious toleration. As concerns about uncivil disagreement achieved new prominence after the Reformation, seventeenth-century figures as different as Roger Williams, Thomas Hobbes, and John Locke could agree that some restraint on the war of words would be necessary. But they recognized that the prosecution of incivility was often difficult to distinguish from persecution. In their efforts to reconcile diversity with disagreement, they developed competing conceptions of civility as the social bond of tolerant societies that still resonate.

Most modern appeals to civility follow either Hobbes or Locke by proposing to suppress disagreement or exclude persons and positions deemed “uncivil” for the sake of social concord. Compared with his contemporaries’ more robust ideals, Williams’s unabashedly mere civility—a minimal, occasionally contemptuous adherence to culturally contingent rules of respectful behavior—is easily overlooked. Yet Teresa Bejan argues that Williams offers a promising path forward in confronting our own crisis of civility, one that fundamentally challenges our assumptions about what a tolerant—and civil—society should look like.

Contains the chapter ‘“If It Be without Contention”: Hobbes and Civil Silence’