Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General preface
- Full contents: Volumes 1–3
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- 1 Introduction: Hobbes's life in philosophy
- 2 Hobbes and the studia humanitatis
- 3 Hobbes's changing conception of civil science
- 4 Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality
- 5 Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter
- 6 Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state
- 7 Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty
- 8 History and ideology in the English revolution
- 9 The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation
- 10 Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy
- 11 Hobbes and his disciples in France and England
- 12 Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society
- Bibliographies
- Index
4 - Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- General preface
- Full contents: Volumes 1–3
- Acknowledgements
- Conventions
- 1 Introduction: Hobbes's life in philosophy
- 2 Hobbes and the studia humanitatis
- 3 Hobbes's changing conception of civil science
- 4 Hobbes on rhetoric and the construction of morality
- 5 Hobbes and the classical theory of laughter
- 6 Hobbes and the purely artificial person of the state
- 7 Hobbes on the proper signification of liberty
- 8 History and ideology in the English revolution
- 9 The context of Hobbes's theory of political obligation
- 10 Conquest and consent: Hobbes and the engagement controversy
- 11 Hobbes and his disciples in France and England
- 12 Hobbes and the politics of the early Royal Society
- Bibliographies
- Index
Summary
Towards the end of The Elements of Law, which he completed in 1640, Hobbes launched the first of many assaults on the state of moral philosophy in his time. Those who talk about ‘right and wronge, good and bad’, he complains, are largely content to adopt the opinions ‘of such as they admire, as Aristotle, Cicero, Seneca, and others of like authority’. But these writers have failed to provide us with anything approaching a genuine understanding of virtue and vice. They have merely ‘given the names of right and wronge as their passions have dictated; or have followed the autority of other men, as we doe theires’.
One of Hobbes's principal aspirations is to overcome this kind of reliance on authority and to formulate what he describes in Leviathan as ‘the science of Vertue and Vice’. In his later writings he insists with increasing confidence that he has in fact attained his goal. He declares in chapter 26 of Leviathan that his conclusions in that treatise ‘concerning the Morall Vertues’ are ‘evident Truth’. Five years later, we find him speaking with still greater assurance in De Corpore of the contrast between his own knowledge of moral theory and the mere opinions held by ancient philosophers on the same subject. There were ‘no philosophers natural or civil among the ancient Greeks’, even though ‘there were men so called’.
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- Visions of Politics , pp. 87 - 141Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2002
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