Hobbes

The Routledge Philosophers

by A.P. Martinich

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was the first great English philosopher and one of the most important theorists of human nature and politics in the history of Western thought.



This superlative introduction presents Hobbes' main doctrines and arguments, covering all of Hobbes' philosophy. A.P. Martinich begins with a helpful overview of Hobbes' life and work, setting his ideas against the political and scientific background of seventeenth-century England. He then introduces and assesses, in clear chapters, Hobbes' contributions to fundamental areas of philosophy: epistemology and metaphysics, in particular Hobbes' materialism and determinism and his relation to Descartes ethics and political philosophy, concentrating on Hobbes' most famous work, Leviathan, and the theory of the social contract it advances philosophy of science, logic and language, considering Hobbes' theory of nominalism and his writing on rhetoric and the uses of language; religion, examining Hobbes' analyses of revelation, prophets and miracles.
The final chapter considers the legacy of Hobbes' thought and his influence on contemporary philosophy.

Genres: Philosophy

280 pages, Paperback

First published April 25, 2005

About the author

A. P. Martinich is an analytic philosopher at the University of Texas at Austin. His area of interest is the nature and practice of interpretation; history of modern philosophy; the philosophy of language and religion and the history of political thought. He is considered a foremost authority on Thomas Hobbes.

Reviews

[Molsa Roja(s) · Rating 3 out of 5]

An informative and general account of Hobbes’ politics and ethics, as well as religion, science, language and so on. It’s not a bad book at all, but in this very same series there are much better ones, so it’s kind of disappointing.

[Arjun Ravichandran · Rating 2 out of 5]

My interest in Hobbes had been piqued by 'Leviathan', but the barrier of the slightly archaic language - as well as Hobbes' charmless and convoluted prose style - had led me towards a search for a decent secondary resource. My hope was that this resource would do a straightforward job in explicating the cardinal points of Hobbes' thinking, as well as performing a decent unpacking of the resulting implications.

Unfortunately, this book - which I eventually chose - does a passable job of elucidating the Hobbesian paradigm, but it is bogged down by the author's constant interjections. My charitable assumption is that he wanted to encourage a critical distance from the thinker he is elucidating ; in which case, he should have kept his dissenting interpretations towards the end of a chapter.

Alternatively, this book should have been titled "Hobbes : A Critical Introduction".

[Coyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's pretty rare to enjoy reading a scholarly book on anything, but especially on the dry 17th-century writer Hobbes. This book, however, is both interesting and well-written with enough of Martinich's style and sense of humor coming through (footnotes involving Buffy, of all things!) to be just a fun read. Which isn't to say it's for everyone necessarily, just that as an academic book I'm glad I picked it up.

[Alexander]

Concise, clear, and provides a brief but cogent discussion of Hobbes's political theory. Also, there are a lot of suggestions for further reading.