Reading Hobbes Backwards

Reading Hobbes Backwards
Author :
Publisher : Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages : 535
Release :
ISBN-10 : 9781036409197
ISBN-13 : 1036409198
Rating : 4/5 (198 Downloads)

Book Synopsis Reading Hobbes Backwards by : Patricia Springborg

Download or read book Reading Hobbes Backwards written by Patricia Springborg and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2024-10-16 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Reading Hobbes Backwards treats Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) as a peace theorist, who from early manuscripts of his system made by disciples in England and France, to the late Historia Ecclesiastica, saw sectarianism and Trinitarian doctrines supporting the papal monarchy as the ultimate cause of the punishing religious wars of the post-Reformation. But Hobbes was also indebted to scholasticism and the millennia-old Aristotle commentary tradition, Greek, Byzantine, Jewish and Islamic, surviving in the universities of Paris and Oxford, naming his ‘English Politiques’ Leviathan after the scaly monster of the Book of Job, perhaps as a decoy. Politically connected through Cavendish circles and the Virginia Company, Hobbes was a courtier’s client who, until Leviathan, could not speak in his own voice. Adept at ‘political surrogacy’, he authored satires and burlesques which he could own or disown, while promoting the moral education of classical civic humanism against sectarianism. The Appendix provides a synopsis of his relatively inaccessible Latin Church History, an exercise in ‘clandestine philosophy’ from which Hobbes’s intentions in Leviathan can be read off. Chapters are referenced and cross-referenced to be read independently, serving both as reference work and text-book.

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