| Thomas Hobbes recently has been established as the author of three discourses published anonymously in London in 1620. The discourses present an opportunity to reexamine Hobbes's later works and possibly reinterpret his overall philosophy. This essay will show a consistency between the early discourses and the later works, particularly Hobbes's magnum opus, Leviathan, and will establish Hobbes as holding a "theistic-nominalist" view of the world. It will examine his theories of knowledge; the world, God, and man; the ensuing predicament among men; and the solution to the predicament: sovereignty and law. It will consider the only scholarship previously produced on the three discourses, by Arlene Saxonhouse, and will attempt to counter her thesis, arguing that Hobbes's political theory is not rooted in Machiavelli's secular philosophy of manipulative politics, but rather interprets the world as a divinely created, problematic, nominalistic universe of chance, causes, and consequences and poses a divinely grounded human response. It will also argue that Hobbes bypasses Machiavelli and rather draws his fundamental ideas from classical nominalists. Hobbes saw the world as a multitude of perceptions of particular entities--natural, human, and divine--the motions of which are driven by voluntary divine or human will; and he argued that the combination of liberty in voluntary will and causality in the motions of mind and body present a problem for the movements of human beings with independent desires. The worst case of this problem is expressed in anarchy, which comprises each individual in conflict with each other individual--Hobbes's natural state of war. Hobbes's solution is an artifactual intersubjective rational "soul," an analogue to the divine creation, a body of fundamental law to create a sovereign power that, in turn, creates and enforces a body of non-fundamental law to coordinate the movements of subjects in their pursuit of preservation and felicity. |
