Download or read book The Obsession of Thomas Hobbes written by Jules Steinberg and published by Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers. This book was released on 1988 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is organized around the claim that if we wish to have a coherent and accurate understanding of the meaning of the political philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, we must reject the truth of the conventional scholarly assertion that Hobbes did not write about the English Civil War. Professor Steinberg argues that Hobbes writes as a traditional political philosopher engaged in developing a polemical attack intended to ridicule and condemn the ideological doctrines of the men who caused the English Civil War. The author explains how the meaning of Hobbes's political writings emerges in connection with the manner in which Hobbes writes about the major issues associated directly with the English Civil War.
Download or read book Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Natural Philosophy written by Stephen J. Finn and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2004-06-04 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1625, Charles I inherited not only his father's crown, but also his desire to run the country without interference from Parliament. But many members of Parliament opposed the King on issues of taxation, religion and the royal prerogative. It was in this historical context that Hobbes presented a political philosophy that, at least in his opinion, achieved the status of a science, in a nation that was 'boiling hot with questions concerning the rights of dominion and the obedience due from subjects'. In this important new book, Stephen J. Finn argues that, contrary to the traditional interpretation, Hobbes's political views influence his theoretical and natural philosophy and not the other way about. Such an interpretation, it is argued, provides a better appreciation of Hobbes's writings, both philosophical and political.
Download or read book Aspects of Hobbes written by Noel Malcolm and published by Clarendon Press. This book was released on 2002-11-07 with total page 660 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Aspects of Hobbes is a major event in the study of Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), one of the giants of early modern thought. These essays are the fruit of many years' research by one of the world's leading Hobbes scholars. Noel Malcolm offers not only succinct introductions to Hobbes's life and thought, but also path-breaking studies of many different aspects of his political philosophy, his scientific and religious theories, his relations with his contemporaries, the sources of his ideas, the printing history of his works, and his influence on European thought. - ;Noel Malcolm, one of the world's leading experts on Thomas Hobbes, presents a set of extended essays on a wide variety of aspects of the life and work of this giant of early modern thought. Malcolm offers a succinct introduction to Hobbes's life and thought, as a foundation for his discussion of such topics as his political philosophy, his theory of international relations, the development of his mechanistic world-view, and his subversive Biblical criticism. Several of the essays pay special attention to the European dimensions of Hobbes's life, his sources and his influence; the longest surveys the entire European reception of his work from the 1640s to the 1750s. All the essays are based on a deep knowledge of primary sources, and many present striking new discoveries about Hobbes's life, his manuscripts, and the printing history of his works. Aspects of Hobbes will be essential reading not only for Hobbes specialists, but also for all those interested in seventeenth-century intellectual history more generally, both British and European. - ;Aspects of Hobbes is an unassuming title for what is no less than a landmark in Hobbes studies. This book is essential reading for anyone interested in the world of Hobbes. - Renaissance Quarterly;[Noel Malcolm] is a figure of incisive intelligence and great literary tact. Aspects of Hobbes shows his astonishing range to great advantage, casting light from all points of the compass on his single most enduring obsession, the incomparable Thomas Hobbes. - Times Higher Education Supplement;... while the earliest essays reprinted here never fall below a high level, the more recent ones join maturity of judgement to breadth of learning. - Political Studies Review;The illuminating quality of these pieces derives, (too), from a pertinacity that causes the author to explore relentlessly the byways as well as the highways of Hobbes's era, and to bring back many unexpected treats for the reader. - Political Studies Review;Malcolm's arguments are direct and very well-informed ... There is no doubt about the quality of the scholarship and writing in this book. Anyone engaged in the history of ideas will profit from Malcolm's work. Anyone not currently engaged could do no better than to start with this book as their introduction. Malcolm's biography of Hobbes is something to look forward to. - The Philosophers' Magazine;Malcolm displays not just a formidable grip on a diversity of detail, but an admirable clarity and precision in the presentation of his arguments, sustaining a genuine urgency about the conclusions of his enquiries. - The Philosophers' Magazine;Malcolm adeptly marshals his arguments, deftly states his views and, more often than not, dispatches his scholarly opponents. All done in an eminently readable and informative style, such that the previously uninformed reader profits both from the substance of Malcolm's views and their presentation. - The Philosophers' Magazine;Aspects of Hobbes is a work of profound scholarship, displaying a breadth and depth of erudition that is beyond praise. But it is much more than that: Malcolm never loses the reader in the fascinating details of Hobbes's intellectual background and influence that he has uncovered. By linking the minutiae of his life and times with the core claims of his works he has given us a remarkable study in early modern European intellectual history. - New Statesman;Magnificent ... The book is a monument to scholarship. It shows what can be achieved when a fine historian gets to grips with a great philosopher, and it is worth any number of internalist re-readings of Hobbes's texts. - Mark Goldie, Times Literary Supplement;One of the most comprehensive portraits of Hobbes's intellectual development, career and contexts yet written ... Malcolm's essay 'Hobbes's theory of International Relations' should be required reading for all students of IR ... this is a very impressive book by one of the world's leading Hobbes scholars. It is elegantly written and massively erudite throughout, covering a vast and complex range of issues, ideas and personalities. As well as brilliant snapshots of some of the lesser known and even arcane aspects of the life and works of Thomas Hobbes, it provides a necessary corrective to the simplistic and unhistorical way in which he has been appropriated by generations of IR scholars. - Duncan S. A. Bell, University of Cambridge, UK;Many have written on Hobbes, but few have had the wealth and depth of historical knowledge, the linguistic and bibliographic skills and, most significantly, the philosophical rigorousness which Malcolm deploys consistently in Aspects of Hobbes, a collection of 14 impressive, and often also delightful, scholarly papers. - Sylvana Tomaselli, The Spectator;Malcolm has a firm grasp of the main philosophical and political questions raised by Hobbes, and has given his material a clear intellectual form. - Edward Skidelsky, Daily Telegraph;Aspects of Hobbes brings together for the first time Malcolm's published essays on Hobbes with extensive new contributions, many of which substantially alter our understanding of the great philosopher ... Malcolm's formidable intellectual range matches that of his subject. - Jon Parkin, The Guardian;This is Malcolm the uncompromising scholar and historian ... the range is astonishing. Repeatedly he crosses boundaries of period, of nation, of language ... formidable learning. - Blair Worden, Sunday Telegraph
Download or read book Subverting the Leviathan written by James R. Martel and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2007 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes's landmark work on political philosophy, James Martel argues that although Hobbes pays lip service to the superior interpretive authority of the sovereign, he consistently subverts this authority throughout the book by returning it to the reader. Martel demonstrates that Hobbes's radical method of reading not only undermines his own authority in the text, but, by extension, the authority of the sovereign as well. To make his point, Martel looks closely at Hobbes's understanding of religious and rhetorical representation. In Leviathan, idolatry is not just a matter of worshipping images but also a consequence of bad reading. Hobbes speaks of the "error of separated essences," in which a sign takes precedence over the idea or object it represents, and warns that when the sign is given such agency, it becomes a disembodied fantasy leading to a "kingdom of darkness." To combat such idolatry, Hobbes offers a method of reading in which one resists the rhetorical manipulation of figures and tropes and recognizes the codes and structures of language for what they are-the only way to convey a fundamental inability to ever know "the thing itself." Making the leap to politics, Martel suggests that following Hobbes's argument, the sovereign can also be seen as idolatrous--a separated essence--a figure who supplants the people it purportedly represents, and that learning to be better readers enables us to challenge, if not defeat, the authority of the sovereign.
Download or read book Thomas Hobbes written by Otfried Höffe and published by State University of New York Press. This book was released on 2015-09-08 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Best known for his contributions to political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes set out to develop a coherent philosophical system extending from logic and natural philosophy to civil and religious philosophy. In this introduction to Hobbes's thought, Otfried Höffe begins by providing an overview of the entire scope of his work, making clear its systematic character through analysis of his natural philosophy, his individual and social anthropology, and his political thought. He then offers an innovative examination of religious and ecclesiastical questions, touching not only on the political implications of religion so important to Hobbes, but also on his attempt to reconstruct Christianity in terms of a materialistic philosophy. He also explores Hobbes's continuous critique of Aristotle and Aristotelian Scholastics, in which Höffe argues that Hobbes and Aristotle have much more in common philosophically than is normally supposed—and certainly more than Hobbes himself acknowledged. Finally, Höffe sketches the influence Hobbes had and continues to have on the development of legal and political philosophy.
Download or read book Leviathan written by Thomas Hobbes and published by Strelbytskyy Multimedia Publishing. This book was released on 2018-08-22 with total page 652 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Common-Wealth Ecclesiastical and Civil is a book written by an English materialist philosopher Thomas Hobbes about problems of the state existence and development. Leviathan is a name of a Bible monster, a symbol of nature powers that belittles a man. Hobbes uses this character to describe a powerful state (“God of the death”). He starts with a postulate about a natural human state (“the war of all against all”) and develops the idea “man is a wolf to a man”. When people stay for a long time in the position of an inevitable extermination they give a part of their natural rights, for the sake of their lives and general peace, according to an unspoken agreement to someone who is obliged to maintain a free usage of the rest of their rights – to the state. The state, a union of people, where the will of a single one (the state) is compulsory for everybody, has a task to regulate the relations between all the people. The book was banned several times in England and Russia.
Download or read book Thomas Hobbes and Political Theory written by Mary G. Dietz and published by University Press of Kansas. This book was released on 1990-01-30 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This volume explores, from a variety of perspectives, the political theory of the man who is arguably the greatest English political thinker. It is the first substantial collection of new, critical essays on Thomas Hobbes by leading scholars in over a decade. Hobbes’s writings stirred debate in his own lifetime, for two centuries thereafter, and continue to do so in ours. They emerged in a period of intense political turmoil—a time of civil war and regicide, of puritanical rule and royal restoration. “They were motivated,” Dietz argues, “by concrete political problems and a practical concern, namely, to secure political order, absolute sovereignty, and civil peace.” The contributors emphasize and answer a series of expressly political questions that, to date, have not been fully addressed in the Hobbes literature. They contend that Hobbes’s writings are not mere static artifacts of a particular historical milieu, but rather rich sources of a variety of interpretations and criticisms that spur discussion and debate in their turn.
Download or read book The Politics of Motion written by Thomas A. SpragensJr. and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Two principal issues interact and overlap in this penetrating analysis: the relationship between Hobbes' natural philosophy and his civil philosophy, and the relationship between Hobbes' thought and the Aristotelian world view that constituted the philosophical orthodoxy he rejected. On the first point Thomas A. Spragens Jr. argues that Hobbes' political ideas were in fact significantly influenced by his cosmological perceptions, although they were not, and could not have been, completely derived from that source. On the second, the author demonstrates that Hobbes undertook a highly systematic transformation of Aristotelian cosmology: he borrowed the form of the Aristotelian cosmology, but radically refashioned its substance to accommodate the discoveries of contemporaries such as Galileo.
Download or read book Thomas Hobbes written by R.E.R. Bunce and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-14 with total page 158 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this volume, Dr Bunce (University of Cambridge) introduces Hobbes' ambitious philosophical project to discover the principles that govern the social world. If Hobbes' immodest assessment that he successfully attained this goal may be disputed, Bunce nevertheless captures the extraordinary enduring value of Hobbes' work for the contemporary reader. Thomas Hobbes's name and the title of his most famous work, Leviathan, have come to be synonymous with the idea that the natural state of humankind is 'nasty, brutish, and short' and only the intervention of a munificent overlord may spare men and women from this unenviable fate by imposing order where there would otherwise be chaos. The problem that Hobbes formulated resonates through the centuries as the enduring dilemma of political organisation and social cooperation. Indeed it can be seen today in fields as diverse as theoretical game theory and international relations.
Download or read book The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes written by Jeffrey R. Collins and published by OUP Oxford. This book was released on 2005-10-13 with total page 326 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Allegiance of Thomas Hobbes offers a revisionist interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's evolving response to the English Revolution. It rejects the prevailing understanding of Hobbes as a consistent, if idiosyncratic, royalist, and vindicates the contemporaneous view that the publication of Leviathan marked Hobbes's accommodation with England's revolutionary regime. In sustaining these conclusions, Professor Collins foregrounds the religious features of Hobbes's writings, and maintains a contextual focus on the broader religious dynamics of the English Revolution itself. Hobbes and the Revolution are both placed within the tumultuous historical process that saw the emerging English state coercively secure jurisdictional control over national religion and the corporate church. Seen in the light of this history, Thomas Hobbes emerges as a theorist who moved with, rather than against, the revolutionary currents of his age. The strongest claim of the book is that Hobbes was motivated by his deep detestation of clerical power to break with the Stuart cause and to justify the religious policies of England's post-regicidal masters, including Oliver Cromwell. Methodologically, Professor Collins supplements intellectual or linguistic contextual analysis with original research into Hobbes's biography, the prosopography of his associates, the reception of Hobbes's published works, and the nature of the English Revolution as a religious conflict. This multi-dimensional contextual approach produces, among other fruits: a new understanding of the political implications of Leviathan; an original interpretation of Hobbes's civil war history, Behemoth; a clearer picture of Hobbes's career during the neglected period of the 1650s; and a revisionist interpretation of Hobbes's reaction to the emergence of English republicanism. By presenting Thomas Hobbes as a political actor within a precisely defined political context, Professor Collins has recovered the significance of Hobbes's writings as artefacts of the English Revolution.
Download or read book Three Discourses written by Thomas Hobbes and published by University of Chicago Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 204 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in three centuries, this book brings back into print three discourses now confirmed to have been written by the young Thomas Hobbes. Their contents may well lead to a resolution of the long-standing controversy surrounding Hobbes's early influences and the subsequent development of his thought. The volume begins with the recent history of the discourses, first published as part of the anonymous seventeenth-century work, Horae Subsecivae. Drawing upon both internal evidence and external confirmation afforded by new statistical "wordprinting" techniques, the editors present a compelling case for Hobbes's authorship. Saxonhouse and Reynolds present the complete texts of the discourse with full annotations and modernized spellings. These are followed by a lengthy essay analyzing the pieces' significance for Hobbes's intellectual development and modern political thought more generally. The discourses provide the strongest evidence to date for the profound influences of Bacon and Machiavelli on the young Hobbes, and they add a new dimension to the much-debated impact of the scientific method on his thought. The book also contains both introductory and in-depth explanations of statistical "wordprinting."
Download or read book The Rhetoric of Leviathan written by David Johnston and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 1989-08-21 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The description for this book, The Rhetoric of Leviathan: Thomas Hobbes and the Politics of Cultural Transformation, will be forthcoming.
Download or read book Of Man written by Thomas Hobbes and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2005-08-25 with total page 103 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves � and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives � and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are. The founding father of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes, living in an era of horrific violence, saw human life as meaningless and cruel; here, he argues the only way to escape this brutality is for all to accept a �social contract� that acknowledges the greater authority of a Sovereign leader.
Download or read book Thomas Hobbes written by Alfred Edward Taylor and published by . This book was released on 1908 with total page 144 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Leviathan written by Thomas Hobbes and published by The Floating Press. This book was released on 2009-06-01 with total page 982 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Hobbes' Leviathan, from 1651, is one of the first and most influential arguments towards social contract. Written in the midst of the English Civil War, it concerns the structure of government and society and argues for strong central governance and the rule of an absolute sovereign as the way to avoid civil war and chaos.
Download or read book Hobbes on Resistance written by Susanne Sreedhar and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-09-02 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Hobbes's political theory has traditionally been taken to be an endorsement of state power and a prescription for unconditional obedience to the sovereign's will. In this book, Susanne Sreedhar develops a novel interpretation of Hobbes's theory of political obligation and explores important cases where Hobbes claims that subjects have a right to disobey and resist state power, even when their lives are not directly threatened. Drawing attention to this broader set of rights, her comprehensive analysis of Hobbes's account of political disobedience reveals a unified and coherent theory of resistance that has previously gone unnoticed and undefended. Her book will appeal to all who are interested in the nature and limits of political authority, the right of self-defense, the right of revolution, and the modern origins of these issues.
Download or read book An Analysis of Thomas Hobbes s Leviathan written by Jeremy Kleidosty and published by CRC Press. This book was released on 2017-07-05 with total page 101 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Thomas Hobbes is a towering figure in the history of modern thought and political philosophy. He remains best remembered for his 1651 treatise on government, Leviathan, a work that shows at the very best the reasoning skills of a deeply original and creative thinker. Creative thinking is all about taking a novel approach to questions and problems – showing them in a new light. When Hobbes was writing Leviathan, the standard approach to understanding (and advocating for) monarchical government was to argue, using Christian theology, that kings and queens gained their power and legitimacy from God. At a time of intense political turmoil in England – with civil war raging from 1642-51 – Hobbes took the original step of basing a political theory upon reason alone, and focusing on human nature. His closely-reasoned arguments made the book a controversial best-seller across Europe at the time of its publication, and it has remained a cornerstone of political theory ever since. Though Hobbes argued for government by an absolute monarch, many of his ideas and precepts helped form modern liberal ideas of government, influencing, among others, the American Constitution.
