New article on automata in Hobbes
Description
Some scholars maintain that the Hobbesian man, commonwealth, or both are analogous – or even identical – to an automaton. Yet automata as a concept remains relatively underexplored in Hobbes’s corpus. This paper aims to address this gap. Standing at the margin between nature and artifice, animate and inanimate, we find three heads of Hobbesian automata emerging from (i) the texts he translated, (ii) the mechanical artifices that surrounded him, and (iii) the physiology he greatly appreciated. These new contributions provide a fuller account of the rich, lively world of Hobbes’s political thought – one that moreover reemphasizes his Aristotelian influences.
