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Hobbes Studies
Volumes & issues:
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Hobbes's "Mortal God" and Renaissance Hermeticism
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- Research made by Schuhmann and Bredekamp has pointed up the unsuspected links between Hobbes and one of the ancient traditions best loved by Renaissance philosophy: Hermeticism. Our goal will be to proceed further and to stress the Hermetic significance implicit in the formula "mortal God". If Asclepius can act as a source for the theme of the fabrication of gods, it does not fit in with the antithesis ("mortal god/immortal God") typical of the Leviathan. A proper source for this topic can rather be found in treatise X ("Clavis") of the Corpus Hermeticum, well known to Ficino and to Iustus Lipsius. We must also stress one capital difference: whereas in the Hermetic texts man's apotheosis passes through gnosis and the exercise of the intellect, reserved in practice for a few selected people, in Leviathan on the contrary it is the holder of sovereignty who acquires the features of the "mortal god". Divinisation passes through politics, with the delicate artificial process of "generating the state"; knowledge only provides the tools for the rational technique needed to elaborate sovereignty, through stipulating pacts and the convention of impersonation. The "artificial man" as a mortal God is the apotheosis of the common man who enters into the founding pact with his ordinary intellectual and motivational faculties.
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Hobbes's Fool the Stultus, Grotius, and the Epicurean Tradition
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- Among the paradoxical aspects of Hobbes's scepticism attention has recently turned to Hobbes's fool of Leviathan, chapter xv, where Hobbes makes a claim about justice that paraphrases Psalm 52:1: "The fool hath said in his heart there is no God." It is a charge of which Hobbes himself could be suspected, but in fact we see that it is on this startling claim that his legal positivism rests. Moreover it is embedded in a theory of natural law that Hobbes inherited from the late scholastics and that he shares in common with Grotius as a practical solution to the problem of scepticism. Indeed, the fool is not even honoured with the designation "sceptic." He is simply dumb, stultus, one of the mindless mob, or those led astray by priests. Hobbes's treatment of the fool as stultus is Epicurean, as we see in the Historia Ecclesiastica, where he gives the topos special attention, and Epicureanism helps us solve the puzzle of the fool.
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Thomas Hobbes's doctrine of conscience and theories of synderesis in Renaissance England
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- Is there a specifically "Hobbesian moment" in the extremely complex history of the idea of conscience? In order to answer this question and to understand why Hobbes's conception of conscience was so innovative, one needs to look at the materials he used to build his system, including the medieval doctrine of synderesis. The article examines the way this doctrine was both perpetuated and altered in Renaissance England.
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'The Matter, Forme, and Power of a Common-wealth': Thomas Hobbes and Late Renaissance Commentary on Aristotle's Politics
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- Hobbes's relation to the later Aristotelian tradition, in both its scholastic and its humanists variants, has been increasingly explored by scholars. However, on two fundamental points (the naturalness of the city and the use of the matter/form distinction in the political works), there is more to be said in this connection. A close examination of a range of late Renaissance commentaries on Aristotle's Politics shows that they elucidate a picture of pre-civic human nature that had (contrary to Hobbes's implication) much in common with that of Hobbes. Moreover, they deployed the matter-form distinction in their analysis of the city or civitas in ways that are in important respects similar to Hobbes's procedure in De cive and Leviathan. The paper concludes that Hobbes drew on this tradition in multiple ways while at the same time undermining some of its principal conclusions; Hobbes was in no sense an 'Aristotelian' even if his philosophy has substantial debts to Aristotelianism.
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