Posts

New article on Hobbes’ Biological Rhetoric and the Covenant

/in , , /by

Kuschel, Gonzalo Bustamante (2021): Hobbes’ Biological Rhetoric and the Covenant, in: Philosophy & Rhetoric.

Description
For Victoria Kahn, Hobbes’ argument that fear of violent death is “the passion to be reckoned upon” in explaining what inclines men to peace must be interpreted as a mimetic argument. However, Kahn then notes a paradox that makes Hobbes’ thinking problematic: whereas love and the desires are appetites that produce an imitative effect, fear is different. Though also a passion, fear lacks that capacity to produce a mimetic effect or, therefore, to generate a contract. My hypothesis is that resolving the dilemma presented in Kahn’s interpretation of Hobbes requires a shift in attention from mimesis to rhetoric and, more specifically, to biological rhetoric as defined by Nancy Struever. This approach to Hobbes makes it possible to understand the rhetorical role of fear in generating and maintaining the social contract, and how the problem that Kahn signals —the impotence of fear in relation to mimesis — can be resolved.

New article: A Hobbesian approach to collective action

/in , , /by

Evrigenis, Ioannis D. (2021): In praise of dystopias: a Hobbesian approach to collective action, in: Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, https://doi.org/10.1080/13698230.2021.1893249

Abstract
Long before Prospect Theory and Loss Aversion Theory, Thomas Hobbes’s account of self-interest and risk assessment formed the basis of a powerful argument for the benefits of negative appeals. Dismissing the pursuit of highest and final goods as inherently incapable of yielding collective action, Hobbes proposed a method focusing instead on the highest evil, something that individuals with different goals could agree on as a barrier to their respective pursuits. In his own theory, that evil was violent death in the dystopian setting of his notorious state of nature. The staying power of Hobbes’s memorable image itself validates Hobbes’s rationale and offers important reminders regarding the limits of utopian appeals to collective action.

Call for papers: What were the early moderns afraid of?

/in /by

Call for papers for a two-day conference at the University of Antwerp. June 8-9 2017.

The early moderns seem to have had an almost endless list of fears: God, devils, ghosts, war, each other, nature, lack of knowledge, curiosity, new science, the emotions, free-thinking, sex, women, famine, execution, the law, lawlessness, death, chaos, other religions and other cultures, loss or dissolution of social rank… and their fears spanned the realms of the passions, reason, religion, culture, and politics.
The motivation for the conference is the general question of what the early moderns were afraid of, philosophically, personally, and politically. Where did these fears come from? Where did they believe they came from? How did they try to overcome these fears, or profit from them? What were they not afraid of? What did they think fear was? How different were their fears from our own?
The conference seeks to investigate some philosophical and historical aspects of early modern thought, as a means to a fuller picture of early modern conceptions of human nature and society, and to take a different approach to some historical questions. We are open to papers both philosophical and historical, addressing any aspect of fear in the early modern period.

Keynote speakers:
Winfried Schröder (Marburg)
Provisional title: Naturalism – a spectre which haunted the early moderns
Peter Schröder (UCL)
Provisional title: “I have almost forgot the taste of fear” – Some aspects of fear in the early modern mindset

Papers will be 30 minutes long, with 15 minutes for discussion. Lunches, coffee, and dinner on the first night will be provided. Unfortunately, we cannot reimburse for travel or accommodation.

Please send abstracts of 300-500 words to alissa.macmillan@uantwerpen.be by March 20, 2017, and we will let you know of our decision by the end of the month.