Author: Christopher Holman
Publisher: State University of New York Press
ISBN: 1438490445
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 405
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Book Description
At a time when nearly all political actors and observers—despite the nature of their normative commitments—morally appeal to the language of democracy, the particular signification of the term has become obscured. Hobbes and the Democratic Imaginary argues that critical engagement with various elements of the work of Hobbes, a notorious critic of democracy, can deepen our understanding of the problems, stakes, and ethics of democratic life. Firstly, Hobbes's descriptive anatomy of democratic sovereignty reveals what is essential to the institution of this form of government, in the face of the conceptual confusion that characterizes the contemporary deployment of democratic terminology. Secondly, Hobbes's critique of the mechanics of democracy points toward certain fundamental political risks that are internal to its mode of operation. And thirdly, contrary to Hobbes's own intentions, Christopher Holman shows how the selective redeployment of certain Hobbesian categories could help construct a normative ground in which democracy is the ethical choice in relation to other sovereign forms.
Author: Tom Sorell
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521422444
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 420
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Book Description
The most convenient, accessible guide to Hobbes available.
Author: Mónica Brito Vieira
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 9004181776
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 304
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Book Description
Commentators have traditionally constructed Hobbes's thinking on representation too narrowly, as a self-contained area of his political theory. This book challenges this orthodoxy of Hobbes scholarship, which owes less to Hobbes’s thought than to contemporary preconceptions of what counts as political thinking. In her powerful and original analysis, Mónica Brito Vieira mines neglected strands of Hobbes's theory of representation, and reinstates it in a much wider pattern of Hobbes’s theorizing about human thought and action in relation to widely varied images, roles and fictions. The result is a compelling portrait of how man's natural power to form representations through the imagination and artifice underpins his capacity to break away from nature, and fashion a world that best suits his needs.
Author: Zarka Yves Charles Zarka
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474401201
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 278
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Book Description
Yves Charles Zarka shows you how Hobbes established the framework for modern political thought. Discover the origin of liberalism in the Hobbesian theory of negative liberty; that Hobbesian interest and contract are essential to contemporary discussions of the comportment of economic actors; and how state sovereignty returns anew in the form of the servility of the state. At the same time, Zarka controversially argues against received readings claiming that Hobbes is a thinker of a state monopoly on legitimate violence.
Author: Gregorio Baldin
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030414140
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 234
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Book Description
This book, translated from Italian, discusses the influence of Galileo on Hobbes’ natural philosophy. In his De motu, loco et tempore or Anti-White (~ 1643), Thomas Hobbes describes Galileo as “the greatest philosopher of all times”, and in De Corpore (1655), the Italian scientist is presented as the one who “opened the door of all physics, that is, the nature of motion.” The book gives a detailed analysis of Galileo’s legacy in Hobbes’s philosophy, exploring four main issues: a comparison between Hobbes’ and Mersenne’s natural philosophies, the Galilean Principles of Hobbes’ philosophical system, a comparison between Galileo’s momentum and Hobbes’s conatus , and Hobbes’ and Galileo’s theories of matter. The book also analyses the role played by Marin Mersenne, in spreading Galileo’s ideas in France, and as a discussant of Hobbes. It highlights the many aspects of Hobbes’ relationship with Galileo: the methodological and epistemological elements, but also the conceptual and the lexical analogies in the field of physics, to arrive, finally, at a close comparison on the subject of the matter. From this analysis emerges a shared mechanical conception of the universe open and infinite, that replaces the Aristotelian cosmos, and which is populated by two elements only: matter and motion.
Author: Gordon Hull
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1441173196
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 348
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Book Description
Hobbes and the Making of Modern Political Thought considers what it is that makes the study of Hobbes so compelling. Gordon Hull reads Hobbes as the first 'modern' political philosopher. In Hobbes we find the combination of an anomalous and anachronistic view of geometry and a radical, almost post-modern understanding of language. After situation Hobbes against the late scholastic and Machiavellian traditions against which he wrote, the book studies Hobbes's neglected writings on mathematics and language. That analysis then motivates a rereading of his famous pronouncements about the state of nature and the absolutist state that is supposed to be its remedy. The book concludes by showing the relevance of Hobbes to contemporary debates around the radically democratic potential of the 'multitude'. Hobbesian thought is the opposition point in these debates; what emerges here is that Hobbes is very much still with us. As a theorist who is interested in managing and channelling the productive energies of the population, Hobbes emerges as the first theorist of what we now call biopolitics.
Author: G.A. Rogers
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 940158933X
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 259
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Book Description
The Cambridge Platonists were defenders of tolerance in the political as well as the moral sphere ; they held that practical j u d g e m e n t came down in the last instance to individual conscience ; and they laid the foundations of our modern conceptions of conscience and liberty. But at the same time they ma intained the existence of eternal truths , and of a Good-in-itself , identical with Truth and Being, refusing to admit that freedom of conscience i m p li e d moral relativism. They were critics of dogmatism, and of the sectarian notion of "enthusiasm" as a source of illumination , on the grounds that both were disruptive of social harmony; they pleaded the cause of reason , in the hope that it could become the foundation of all human knowledge . Yet , for all that , they ma intained that a certain sort of mystical illumination lay at the heart of all true thought , and that human reason had validity only in virtue of i t s divine origin . They debated with Des cartes and took a keen interest in his mech- ism and his dualism ; they brought the atomistic theories of Democritus back into repute; and they sought to provide a detailed account of the causality link ing all phenomena.
Author: Warren Montag
Publisher: Edinburgh University Press
ISBN: 1474404243
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 352
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Book Description
Explores the core of Balibars work since 1980This collection explores Balibars rethinking of the connections between subjection and subjectivity by tracing the genealogies of these concepts in their discursive history. The 12 essays provide an overview of Balibars work after his collaboration with Althusser. They explain and expand his framework; in particular, by restoring Arabic and Islamic thought to the conversation on the citizen subject. The collection includes two previously untranslated essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes. Key FeaturesThe first English-language edited collection to focus on BalibarPresents and explains Balibars key contributions to political theory and the history of political philosophyIncludes two essays by Balibar himself on Carl Schmitt and Thomas Hobbes: 'Schmitts Hobbes, Hobbess Schmitt' and 'The Mortal God and his Faithful Subjects: Hobbes, Schmitt and the Antinomies of Secularism'Contributors include Atienne Balibar, Nancy Armstrong, Giorgos Fourtounis, Mohamed Moulfi
Author: S.A. Lloyd
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1441190457
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 345
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Book Description
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is widely held to be one of the most important thinkers in the history of philosophy. His contributions to ethics, political philosophy and psychology in particular were hugely innovative and he was regarded by his contemporaries as a major intellectual figure. This comprehensive and accessible guide to Hobbes's life and work features 120 specially commissioned entries written by a team of leading experts in the field of seventeenth-century philosophy and political thought, covering every aspect of Hobbes's ideas. The Companion presents a comprehensive overview of the major themes and topics in Hobbes's work, in particular within the fields of language, political philosophy, moral philosophy and psychology, religion, law and science. It concludes with a thoroughly comprehensive bibliography of primary and secondary sources. This is an essential reference tool for anyone working in the fields of seventeenth-century philosophy and political theory.
Author: Ross Lerner
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
ISBN: 0823283887
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 204
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Book Description
We may think we know what defines religious fanaticism: violent action undertaken with dogmatic certainty. But the term fanatic, from the European Reformation to today, has never been a stable one. Then and now it has been reductively defined to justify state violence and to delegitimize alternative sources of authority. Unknowing Fanaticism rejects the simplified binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, turning to Renaissance literature to demonstrate that fanaticism was integral to how both modern politics and poetics developed, from the German Peasants’ Revolt to the English Civil War. The book traces two entangled approaches to fanaticism in this long Reformation moment: the targeting of it as an extreme political threat and the engagement with it as a deep epistemological and poetic problem. In the first, thinkers of modernity from Martin Luther to Thomas Hobbes and John Locke positioned themselves against fanaticism to pathologize rebellion and abet theological and political control. In the second, which arose alongside and often in response to the first, the poets of fanaticism investigated the link between fanatical self-annihilation—the process by which one could become a vessel for divine violence—and the practices of writing poetry. Edmund Spenser, John Donne, and John Milton recognized in the fanatic’s claim to be a passive instrument of God their own incapacity to know and depict the origins of fanaticism. Yet this crisis of unknowing was a productive one. It led these writers to experiment with poetic techniques that would allow them to address fanaticism’s tendency to unsettle the boundaries between human and divine agency and between individual and collective bodies. These poets demand a new critical method, which this book attempts to model: a historically-minded and politicized formalism that can attend to the complexity of the poetic encounter with fanaticism.
