Well now. Just as I was beginning to think I grasped the readings of Arts 1, Leviathan had to make its way into my life and obliterate all hope of becoming scholarly. I literally have a permanent headache this week from the density of this text.
As much as I find Leviathan really thick and wordy, I also really appreciate how he so clearly lays down each and every concept that he uses in the following chapters. It reads as if he is walking us through an agreement on terms and from there basis his arguments. I am not a very mathematical person, but as Crawford mentioned in lecture, the linguistic equations he uses are actually really interesting to me.
It’s hard for me to picture Hobbes as a modern,forward thinker because of the era that he wrote Leviathan in, but in lecture I really appreciated Hobbes’ point of view on the laws of nature. I found myself ‘hmming’ and ‘hawwing’ over the way that Crawford explains his stance on absolute rule. It is a really well constructed argument, especially when considering how natural law will punish the ruler if they don’t rule in favour of the people. It really all came together for me, and clarified the difficult bits of Leviathan of which there are many…
Megan
Glad you found the lecture helpful! It is hard to read this text without anything to help explain what’s going on. Even my eyes glaze over at times, and I’ve read this text many, many times and think I have a fairly decent grasp on much (not all!) of what Hobbes is saying. It’s not the most engaging read, certainly, but I’m glad you appreciate what he’s doing by laying down definitions and then trying to make sure his arguments follow logically from those. The idea, then, would be that someone could start from his definitions and see if everything that he said afterwards followed logically. I haven’t gone through the argument THAT carefully, but I have gone through parts of it pretty carefully, and I think it works pretty well for the most part. I’ll be trying to convey the major steps in seminar this week.
Oh, and please remember to activate that plugin that allows people to subscribe to comments! Go to settings, then plugins, then activate the “subscribe to comments” one.