RISULTATI RICERCA

Michael Oakeshott as a Critic of Hobbes's Theory of the Will (by Patrick Riley) - ABSTRACT: Patrick Riley asks why the post-War Oakeshott stopped speaking of the incoherence of Hobbes’s philosophy of volition, as he had in his Hobbes studies before the War. One answer is that he became more and more sensitive to the necessity of counterbalancing the determinist reading of Hobbes, which tended to be dominant in the 1970s’ Hobbes studies. He cites the example of Thomas Spragens’s The Politics of Motion (1973), according to which the human will appears only as a natural movement in a material universe. Although Jürgen Overhoff’s Theory of the Will (2000) advances the view that there is complete coherence in Hobbes’s conception of volition, Riley finds his arguments unconvincing. In the end, Riley declares himself favorable to Oakeshott’s "less satisfactory" interpretation of Hobbes, given the incoherence between the Hobbesian critique of free will, fully developed in The Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, and the requirements of a political theory of contract in terms of a theory of rational will.

The Printing and Editing of Hobbes's De Corpore: A Review of Karl Schuhmann's Edition (by Noel Malcolm) - ABSTRACT: In a careful and appreciative review of Karl Schuhmann’s edition of De corpore, Noel Malcolm points out some shortcomings stemming from what he takes to be a flaw in interpretive perspective, namely, the adoption of editorial standards and procedures better fitted for authors of the period of classical antiquity than for those of the early-modern period.

Gianni Paganini addresses the question of Hobbes's relationship to the skeptical tradition, both ancient and modern. If Hobbes borrows from ancient skepticism the idea that it is impossible to distinguish between dreams and waking perceptions, he owes to Montaigne the idea that our sensations, although they can be misleading, are our only access to knowledge. Gianni Paganini gives a systematic account of Hobbes's skeptical arguments, showing how those arguments are included in a more general dogmatic framework, resting upon the assumption that reason can infer the existence of bodies beyond the appearances or phantasms which are given in perception. Although Hobbes tends to insert skeptical elements in a causal and materialist approach to reality, he nevertheless remains, from De principis to De corpore, indebted to old and new skeptical arguments. To put it in another way, phenomena or appearances are for him our unique access into the real world. Beyond Leviathan, it is therefore Hobbes's whole work which is here presented, along the way opened by Richard Popkin, in the perspective of skepticism.

Agostino Lupoli considers anew the skeptical elements in Hobbes’s Logica. At variance with Popkin’s approach, which he finds insufficient, and in the line with the late Arrigo Pacchi’s insights, which he intends to extend, he shows that the De corpore contains both more than traces of skepticism and a very engaged discussion of the thesis of Quod nihil scitur, the famous, but seldom read, book by Francis Sanchez, who taught philosophy and medicine in France (Toulouse) in the early years of seventeenth century. In line with nominalist logic, Sanchez makes a very sharp criticism of Aristotelian theory of the definition, whose ontological claims he criticizes. In accordance with this criticism is Hobbes’s strict nominalism, his tautological conception of the proposition as well as other elements in his logic.