Back when I taught at Yale, I used to give a quiz about Plato’s Republic in the first class meeting for one of my upper-level seminars. The students were all supposed to have taken at least one prior course in which the Republic was read, and I wanted to see how well they remembered it. (I also […]
Tag: philosophy
Fourth in a series. The first two posts in this series sketched my proposal for reading Hobbes’s moral theory in Leviathan, together with some remarks on the bearing of that theory on the book’s political argument. In the third, I pointed out some discreet, but decisive differences between Leviathan‘s Laws of Nature and their antecedents in De Cive, […]
Third in a series. 1. The preceding posts in this series have proposed reading Hobbes’s moral philosophy in Leviathan as a theory of peace. Departing from the widely-held view that Hobbes’s theory is addressed to singular agents’ prudential or strategic interests, I have argued that Hobbes means to do no more (and no less) than identify appropriate norms for peaceable social intercourse, suitable […]
Second in an ongoing series. In last week’s post, I sketched a proposal for reading Hobbes’s venture in moral philosophy in Leviathan. Today I would like to develop that proposal further, opening a broader perspective on the argument of Leviathan as a whole. My proposal — to recapitulate in brief — is that the various moral […]
(First in a series.) 1. What is the point of Thomas Hobbes’s moral philosophy? What question or questions of moral theory did he think he had settled? In writing Leviathan, Hobbes evidently took great pride in his would-be achievement, in that field specifically. Near the end of the book’s First Part, “Of Man,” he claims to provide “the true and only moral philosophy.” He […]
