Rhodes, Professor of Medical Education and Director of Bioethics Education, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Professor of Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY; and Professor of Bioethics and Associate Director of the Clarkson-Mount Sinai Bioethics Program. She writes on a broad array of issues, primarily in bioethics. Her new book is The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism (Oxford University Press, April 2020). In it, she draws on her view of Leviathan as Hobbes’s construction of ethics for sovereigns, and uses a similar approach in her construction of a distinctive ethics for medicine.
Gabriella Slomp, Reader, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Former editor of Hobbes Studies, she has published Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory (2000); edited Thomas Hobbes (2007), coedited International Political Theory After Hobbes (2016), and has published numerous articles on Hobbes in international journals.
Edward Slowik, Professor of Philosophy, Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, and Resident Fellow, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota. His primary area of research is the history and philosophy of science and Early Modern philosophy, with special emphasis on the philosophy of space and spacetime.
Johann Sommerville, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Longman, 1999), and Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1992). He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (1996), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (2007), The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes (2016), and other books on Hobbes. Currently, he is working on an edition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law for the Clarendon series of Hobbes’s works.
Tom Sorell, Professor of Politics and Philosophy, Warwick University. He is the author of Hobbes (Arguments of the Philosophers, Routledge, 1986); Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes; Hobbes and History (with G. A. J. Rogers); Leviathan After 350 Years (with Luc Foisneau); Leviathan Between the Wars (with Luc Foisneau and J-C. Merle). He has written dozens of articles on Hobbes in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and History of Philosophy Quarterly.
Patricia Springborg, Guest Professor, Centre for British Studies of the Humboldt University in Berlin (since 2013), held a Chair in Political Theory at the University of Sydney (1995–2005), and was Professor Ordinario at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy (2007–13). Her research fields include: 1) Thomas Hobbes: Metaphysics, Ecclesiology; 2) The Concept of Needs in Marxist Thought; 3) Early History of the State East and West; 4) Orientalism; 5) Mary Astell (1666–1731) political writings; and currently, 6) Greek into Arabic and Antiquity Transformation, producing 4 books, 4 edited books, and 80 publications in refereed journals and collections.
Justin Steinberg, Professor of Philosophy, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is author of Spinoza’s Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear (Cambridge, 2018), coauthor (with Valtteri Viljanen) of Spinoza (Polity, 2020), and coeditor (with Karolina Hübner) of the forthcoming Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon (Cambridge).
Howard Williams, Honorary Distinguished Professor in the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University and Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth. He is author of Marx; Kant’s Political Philosophy ; Concepts of Ideology; Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic; International Relations in Political Theory; International Relations and the Limits of Political Theory; Kant’s Critique of Hobbes; and Kant and the End of War. He is the coauthor of Francis Fukuyama and the End of History with David Sullivan and G. Matthews. He is a founding editor of the journal Kantian Review and editor of the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the Cambridge University Press series Elements.
Introduction: The Presentation and Structure of Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy
MARCUS P. ADAMS
The shadow of Thomas Hobbes’s ideas stretches across the seventeenth century and continues to present day. His oeuvre ranges from translations of texts by figures such as Homer and Thucydides to the interpretation of Biblical texts, and from works devoted to geometry and optics to civil philosophy and religion. His impact in these and other areas was significant, even if in some cases his views functioned primarily as a foil. In Hobbes’s own time he was reviled as the “monster of Malmesbury” who threatened the Christian religion and failed to appreciate the rise of experimental philosophy. Regarding religion, Abraham Cowley put it succinctly in The True effigies of the monster of Malmesbury, or, Thomas Hobbes in his proper colours (1680) when asserting that “He that will Hobbes Applaud must first Blaspheme.” Similarly, Hobbes received no invitation to join the Royal Society, and he harshly criticized the experimental philosophy as lacking a method when saying “ingenuity is one thing and method [ars] is another. Here method is needed” (Hobbes 1985, 347).1 Given such vitriol, it should be no surprise that the term ‘Hobbist’ was often used pejoratively to identify all that was seen as wrong with and dangerous in Hobbes’s thought.
Many of Hobbes’s contemporaries recognized that these points of pressure on Hobbes’s ideas, as well as others, were not isolated cases; indeed, many saw these problems as symptoms resulting from the overall system of materialist philosophy that Hobbes was advancing. For example, although Hobbes’s extended disputes with John Wallis focused largely on issues in mathematics, Wallis also attacked Hobbes’s metaphysics because of its theological implications.2 Likewise, the wide range of topics in Hobbes’s exchanges with Bishop Bramhall shows the extent to which the worries of Hobbes’s critics were often founded upon Hobbes’s system and not upon what the twentieth-first century reader may, at first glance, see as distinct areas of Hobbes’s thought.3 Hobbes saw himself as offering a system of philosophy with interconnected parts, and his critics frequently attacked it as such.
Given the wide range of Hobbes’s writings, as well as the period of time over which Hobbes was actively writing, revising, and translating his own works, there are many entry points into his thought. For example, one could examine Hobbes by beginning with his early works and tracing the trajectory of his ideas as they developed through differing rhetorical contexts. Such an approach to understanding Hobbes has been greatly aided by some of the excellent resources recently made available to scholars, such as Noel Malcolm’s Clarendon edition of Leviathan (Hobbes 2012), which provides English (1651) and Latin (1668) facing pages of that work, and Deborah Baumgold’s Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory (Baumgold 2017), which offers side-by-side comparison of passages in Elements of Law, De cive, and Leviathan. Alongside close attention to textual details, this approach might also examine Hobbes’s preceding context and influences as well as his immediate context, such as his correspondence (Hobbes 1994b) or the notes on his works as they were in the process of being written, such as Robert Payne’s on De corpore held in the Chatsworth House Hobbes papers (Chatsworth A10).
Another approach to Hobbes’s ideas could excise key arguments, or parts of those arguments, from his corpus and examine them on their own philosophical merits with less attention to textual minutiae. Such a method would seek to offer something like a rational reconstruction, holding Hobbes subject to requirements such as logical consistency and deductive validity, and in doing so seek to provide the best possible picture of what Hobbes sought to demonstrate. Rather than accusing Hobbes of being misguided, or at times even sloppy in his argumentation, this way of engaging Hobbes might attempt to explain away interpretational difficulties here and there with the
