Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids

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My favorite of Matthews’s stories came from the mother of a little boy named Ian. While Ian and his mother were at home, another family came to visit, and the family’s three kids monopolized the television, keeping Ian from seeing his favorite show. After they left, he asked his mother, “Why is it better for three people to be selfish t han for one?” The solution, Hobbes argued, was to put some powerful individual or parliament in charge. The individuals in the state of nature would have to enter into a ‘social contract’, an agreement to give up some of their dangerous freedoms for the sake of safety. Without what he called a ‘sovereign’, life would be a kind of hell. This sovereign would be given the right to inflict severe punishment on anyone who stepped out of line. […] Laws are no good if there isn’t someone or something strong enough to make everyone follow them.’ In it, a giant crowned figure is seen emerging from the landscape, clutching a sword and a crosier, beneath a quote from the Book of Job—" Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei. Iob. 41 . 24" ("There is no power on earth to be compared to him. Job 41 . 24")—further linking the figure to the monster of the book. (Due to disagreements over the precise location of the chapters and verses when they were divided in the Late Middle Ages, the verse Hobbes quotes is usually given as Job 41:33 in modern Christian translations into English, [8] Job 41:25 in the Masoretic text, Septuagint, and the Luther Bible; it is Job 41:24 in the Vulgate.) The torso and arms of the figure are composed of over three hundred persons, in the style of Giuseppe Arcimboldo; all are facing away from the viewer, with just the giant's head having visible facial features. (A manuscript of Leviathan created for Charles II in 1651 has notable differences – a different main head but significantly the body is also composed of many faces, all looking outwards from the body and with a range of expressions.) Baumrin, Bernard Herbert (ed.) Hobbes's Leviathan – interpretation and criticism Belmont, CA: Wadsworth, 1969.

Neither would it carry any Imputation of Falshood . . . if . . . the same Object should produce in several Men’s Minds different Ideas at the same time; v.g. if the Idea, that a Violet produced in one Man’s Mind by his Eyes, were the same that a Marigold produces in another Man’s, and vice versâ.In his witty and learned book Nasty, Brutish, and Short, Hershovitz intertwines parenting and philosophy, recounting his spirited arguments with his kids about infinity, morality, and the existence of God, and teaching half a liberal arts curriculum along the way Jordan Ellenberg, New York Times Bestselling author of Shape There is an enormous amount of biblical scholarship in this third part. However, once Hobbes' initial argument is accepted (that no-one can know for sure anyone else's divine revelation) his conclusion (the religious power is subordinate to the civil) follows from his logic. The very extensive discussions of the chapter were probably necessary for its time. The need (as Hobbes saw it) for the civil sovereign to be supreme arose partly from the many sects that arose around the civil war, and to quash the Pope of Rome's challenge, to which Hobbes devotes an extensive section.

Gottlieb, Anthony (2016). The dream of enlightenment: The rise of modern philosophy. New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation. p.41. ISBN 9780871404435. This amazing new book . . .takes us on a journey through classic and contemporary philosophy powered by questions like ‘What do we have the right to do? When is it okay to do this or that?’ They explore punishment and authority and sex and gender and race and the nature of truth and knowledge and the existence of God and the meaning of life and Scott just does an incredible job.”— Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic Hobbes begins his treatise on politics with an account of human nature. He presents an image of man as matter in motion, attempting to show through example how everything about humanity can be explained materialistically, that is, without recourse to an incorporeal, immaterial soul or a faculty for understanding ideas that are external to the human mind. Schmitt, Carl. The Leviathan in the state theory of Thomas Hobbes – meaning and failure of a political symbol, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2008 (earlier: Greenwood Press, 1996). English, Latin (Hobbes produced a new version of Leviathan in Latin in 1668: [1] Leviathan, sive De materia, forma, & potestate civitatis ecclesiasticae et civilis. [2] Many passages in the Latin version differ from the English version.) [3]He did not see the worry. And this was before The Matrix came out, so I couldn’t appeal to the authority of Keanu Reeves to establish the urgency of the issue. After a few more minutes of muttering about brains and vats, I added, “The department has lots of logic classes too.” Okay, I can hear you say: Matthews is yet another philosopher with aphilosophical kid. That doesn’t tell us much about kids in general. But Matthews didn’t stop with his kids. He talked to people who weren’t philosophers—and heard many similar stories about their kids. Then he started to visit schools to talk to more kids himself. He’d read stories that raised philosophical questions to the kids—then he’d listen to the debate that ensued. Hobbes proceeds by defining terms clearly and unsentimentally. Good and evil are nothing more than terms used to denote an individual's appetites and desires, while these appetites and desires are nothing more than the tendency to move toward or away from an object. Hope is nothing more than an appetite for a thing combined with an opinion that it can be had. He suggests that the dominant political theology of the time, Scholasticism, thrives on confused definitions of everyday words, such as incorporeal substance, which for Hobbes is a contradiction in terms. The second cause is the demonology of the heathen poets: in Hobbes's opinion, demons are nothing more than constructs of the brain. Hobbes then goes on to criticize what he sees as many of the practices of Catholicism: "Now for the worship of saints, and images, and relics, and other things at this day practiced in the Church of Rome, I say they are not allowed by the word of God".