Thomas Hobbes and the State of Nature
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- Опубліковано 21 вер 2024
- Devin Stauffer, Associate Professor of Government, University of Texas, talks about English philosopher and author of "Leviathan," Thomas Hobbes (March 4, 2015).
Professor Stauffer specializes in classical and early modern political philosophy. Most of his research has focused on classical thought, but his current work also examines the origins of liberalism, the theoretical foundations of modernity, and the divide between ancient and modern political thought. He is the author of "Plato's Introduction to the Question of Justice" (SUNY, 2001), coauthor and cotranslator of "Empire and the Ends of Politics: Plato's Menexenus and Pericles' Funeral Oration" (Focus Philosophical Library, 1999), and author of "The Unity of Plato's Gorgias: Rhetoric, Justice, and the Philosophic Life" (Cambridge, 2006).
The Emory Williams Lecture Series in the Liberal Arts has been made possible by a generous gift from Mr. Emory Williams (Emory College '32 and Trustee Emeritus, Emory University).
college.emory.e...
I'd suggest watching on 1.5 speed.
1.25 would fit lol
I suggest skipping to 47:52
Thankyou!
Thanks for sharing the lecture. It was very informative.
Gözde Tak hi
Special lession to us. Thank you lecturer for this episode.
Excellent , thank you,
Shall we stamp that on a few foreheads...Debunking is the path to peace?
Thanks - enjoyable lecture.
Thank Sir
Thank you
Very informative.
Really very interesting delivery on how Hobbes influenced to build up his theory of nature and the ultimate goal of his theory of nature i.e. the social contract but we expected some more explanations of human nature. In a whole the lecture is enjoyable and informative.
Very little of actual human nature is to be found in Hobbes. His concept of human nature was very primitive at best and very wrong at worst. His ideas of human nature has hobbled Mankind ever since. I don't understand yet the catalyzing agent that makes him so revered and hampered development of the philosophy of human nature. He seems to have no concept of friend and family.
Seems pretty accurate to me
How do you figure? Did you think yourself at war with everyone until government swooped in to keep you from it?
That's not Hobbes' position.
www.gutenberg.org/files/3207/3207-h/3207-h.htm#link2H_4_0122
And because the condition of Man, (as hath been declared in the precedent Chapter) is a condition of Warre of every one against every one;
That seems to indicate that it is very much Hobbes' position.
Hobbes was no more pessimistic about humanity than he was optimistic about humanity. He simply recognized that self-interest, fear, and ego were in all of us, and that those three things forever kept us from being angels. But that didn't mean we were demons, either. "Man is a wolf to man" is a misleading misquote. The actual line was about balance, claiming that humans (both male and female) can both aspire to the heights of godhood or descend to the level of predatory beasts.
"To speak impartially, both sayings are very true; That Man to Man is a kind of God; and that Man to Man is an arrant Wolfe."
от души, братуха, зачитал лекцию. молодец!
You spend two sentences talking about "what happened after Katrina," but the human response to disaster relief is really a key case study for understanding the potentialities of human nature and how they are socially realized. Marcus Aurelius says we are born for mutual aid as top and bottom teeth are formed to each other, a comment later echoed by Dr King and independently stated by Mencius in classical Chinese philosophy. While we see some of the worst of human nature after disasters, we see much of the best as well, after Katrina as after other disasters. Where the cameras choose to focus, and how this focus reinforces authoritarian interests, is another matter. There certainly are nasty and brutish potentialities, but there are kind and cooperative ones too. Hobbes image of the state of nature is distorted by seeing humans in conflict after the collapse of an autocracy, having learned to depend on external control and having an image of power over which to struggle. Who says this is a natural state. Many indigenous cultures are internally peaceful, cooperative, and broadly egalitarian, governed by consensus. Civil war, perhaps, is a product of the resentful and vengeful spirits excited by living under hierarchical regimes that insult our natural sense of fairness and justice, attributable to our innate moral psychology as evolved from small-band primates. The problem of political philosophy is not how to suppress human nature, but rather how to scale it up for larger modern social structures.
Hobbes is one rational man, unlike most other philosophers of his time.
Indeed. Practical he is.
Stealing land and causing America to become a monster was so rational huh... He actually created the war of all against all that we are all going through now. Competition is everywhere and it's disgusting as can be. We are all living in his "state of nature thought experiment".
Machiavelli cleared the bush, Hobbes built a structure.
Weren't these philosophies by those early modern philosophers, such as Hobbes, based on the conditions of Man under Monastic rule as it was at the time? Is this not why eventually that the revolutions took place to remove monarchy, hence, the Russian, French and American revolutions leading to the power being invested in all the people, which led to democracy in which the majority decisions ruled?
Leviathan was written after Charles I was beheaded.
I like it
a great resource for making a sympathetic villain
Hobbes may not have been exactly right but there are still things we can learn from him.
He gets it all (or nearly all) wrong. Hobbes is not proposing the way political order "should be". He DESCRIBES the way political order works, actually works. It is not a proposal for a better society: it is an analysis of the actual workings of society and power, not a blueprint for a better society.
descriptive rather than prescriptive
But it is only because human beings see and understand that they can be better off under certain arrangements that Hobbes believes that he is describing an objective or real basis for any civil order.
Exactly - there's a reason you often hear his name in conjunction with Machiavelli.
Hobbes wrote Leviathan as a philosophical defense of Absolutism, as he himself described why he wrote leviathan "Without partiality, without application, and without other design then to set before men's eyes the mutual relationship between protection and obedience". Basically all his writing is to advocate for and defend traditional and absolute monarchical authority...and I Love It!
YOU ARE SPREADING MISINFORMATION.
It is obvious you have not read the Leviathan. IT LITERALLY STATES in the chapter entitled "Of the Kingdom of God by Nature" that the Leviathan state never has existed, and is not the case. Hobbes says "I recover some hope that one time or other
this writing of mine may fall into the hands of a sovereign who will
consider it himself."
The book is NORMATIVE not DESCRIPTIVE. The only DESCRIPTIVE parts are those referncing the state of nature, human nature, and the laws of nature. The parts about commonwealth ARE NORMATIVE.
stop spreading misinformation, especially when you haven't even read the source material.
I think Hobbes intention was very much to teach to an elite, and that is also shows in his idea of religion; in his way of thinking religion was attended to poor people who would stay in line and obey rich man´s order, who was, in his way of thinking, smart enough to not need religion. He also lived in a time where it seemed that the hierarchies of his time would stayed forever.
He lived in a time of civil war when the world's hierarchies were nearly turned upside down. He saw a king beheaded and the parliament's army debate universal suffrage. Radical communalist preachers squatted on noble land with peasants and talked of levelling society. Hobbes' lesson to the aristocracy was when you come for the king the peasants might come for you next. To him, hierarchy was rationally preferable to civil war.
More like ..."war" of his time would stayed forever... and he was right? War is always here to stay.
If an embryonic sense forces the tides of Christ to be a frame under the doctrines of forclosed yearlings sequences, the rings that hold no eyes together are the monads of a Binet causing these lost words of anymore good than none ever spoken.
How can we ever be confident that we ever truly leave the state of nature when governing bodies are comprised of people who have that nature within them? We enter into social contracts not only with the governing body but with each other as well. Any such contract can be broken at any time in service of the self-interests of those involved. Given changes in incentives or perceptions we are still very much capable of being wolves to each other.
I was considering a PhD at Emory but the low quality of this lecture is a great discouragement.
Hobbes' theory is especially noticeable if you've ever been left alone with a woman in the workplace.
Machiavelli got there first.
Davis Frank Moore Margaret Hernandez Susan
Most influenced by civil war of British
2 people on an island, does my survival depend on your death?, You bet im wacking you
He seriously called the great Saint Thomas Aquinas a "smoosher?" And this is considered academic. I would want my tuition back.
Meh
And you are ....??!
Hobbes' philosophy is one of the most... infamous?? -- Really???!