Robert P Benedict Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy

The Robert P Benedict Lectures on the History of Political Philosophy at Boston University will be delivered by Kinch Hoekstra. These lectures will take three different approaches to Hobbes as a philosopher of Politics. The first will focus on Hobbes’s engagement with the tradition of ‘politic history’ and his attempt to influence politics via history, especially in his edition of Thucydides. The second lecture will argue that for Hobbes philosophy was not simply a way to understand politics, but was itself political. And the final lecture will ask how Hobbes’s philosophical positions were challenged by the unfolding of history in his own time, with a focus on Behemoth, his history of the English civil war.

Kinch Hoekstra is the Chancellor’s Professor of Political Science and Law and Affiliated Professor of Philosophy and Classics at the University of California, Berkeley. He was previously in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy and Classics at Balliol College. Most of his work has been on the history of classical, renaissance, and early modern philosophy.

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