2013-04-15
17 分钟This is philosophy bytes with me, David.
Edmonds, and me, Nigel Warburton.
Philosophy Bytes is available at www.philosophybytes.com.
Philosophy Bytes is made in association with the Institute of Philosophy.
If there were no government or powerful ruler, thought Thomas Hobbes, there would be a war of all against all.
And life, in his words, would be solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
That's why we should consent to be ruled by an absolute sovereign.
Hobbes most famous book, the Leviathan, was written in the 17th century during a period of turmoil with England at war with itself.
But given that Hobbes had already expressed many of the ideas in the Leviathan in previous works, why did he write it?
Noel Malcolm has been engrossed in hobbesian scholarship for many years.
Noel Malcolm, welcome to philosophy Bites.
Thank you.
The topic we're going to focus on is Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan in context.
Now, you've just completed a definitive edition of Leviathan, with the latin translation as well that Hobbes made.
Could you just begin by saying something about how Hobbes came to write Leviathan?
Well, that's quite a big question, and it's one of the ones that I've worked on rather intensively, because I think we never had an absolutely convincing account of that before.
The problem was that by the time Hobbes wrote Leviathan and he was writing it in the late 1640s, he'd already written two full length treatises of political philosophy.
The second of those he'd written just a few years earlier, at least, he'd done the sort of public edition for it and done corrections and improvements to his own satisfaction.
So the problem was, why should he sit down just a few years after doing that and write yet another treatise setting out broadly the same arguments?
And so what I've tried to do is to locate the writing of Leviathan in the period 1649 to the end of 50.