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Archive | August, 2007
Susan Hurley
I was saddened to learn of the death of Susan Hurley today. Here is Alexander Bird’s announcement:
I am very sorry to inform you of the death last night of Professor Susan Hurley. Susan had been suffering from cancer for some time and faced her illness with remarkable dignity. She continued to work until very recently, hosting an international conference at Bristol only five weeks ago. Colleagues here in Bristol and throughout the world will know what an inspiration she was to work with and that although her contribution to several and diverse fields of philosophy was already invaluable, she had much more to offer yet.
As a great admirer of Susan’s work particularly her work on extended cognition, I asked her to contribute to the extended mind project I was working on. I was thrilled by her so graciously accepting the invitation. Though she did qualify that her participation was contingent upon the status of her long-term health, I inferred a sense of optimism in her telling me that “I’m pretty confident something just right for this will emerge within your time frame. I’d like to be part of it.”
We have lost one of the finest philosophers of mind (Susan also distinguished herself in political philosophy).
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How the body shapes the mind
Some thoughts on Shaun Gallagher’s How the Body Shapes the Mind, Oxford University Press
What’s the ugliest
Part of your body?
What’s the ugliest
Part of your body?
Some say your nose
Some say your toes
But I think it’s your MIND…
I think it’s your mind
(Frank Zappa, 1968)
Shaun Gallagher marshals a formidable range of empirical research in support of his philosophical case for the claim that there is an essential relation between human physicality and cognition, thereby challenging the notion of the brain as a closed causal system. Gallagher is not making the trivial claim that the mere fact of our having olfactory, visual, somatosensitive and auditory experience implies that one’s body has a nose, eyes, touch, and ears. The more interesting claim that he is making is that the body is part and parcel of the cognitive system. Gallagher, a leading embodiment theorist, takes up the gauntlet thrown down by neurobiologist Gerald Edelman: “[I]t is not enough to say the mind is embodied; one must say how” (p. 1). Gallagher’s answer to Edelman is already implicit in the question he poses for himself: how “does one’s body appear as part of one’s perceptual field?” (p. 17).
Gallagher’s book is divided up into two sections. The first section is entitled “Scientific and Phenomenological Investigations of Embodiment”; the second “Excursions in Philosophy and Pathology”. Cutting across these two sections is discussion of Gallagher’s primary distinction – body image and body schema (BI-BS) – a distinction that critically informs other related distinctions such as conscious/non-conscious, personal/subpersonal, explicit/tacit, and willed/determined.
Gallagher’s first order of business is to retrieve the BI and BS distinction from a conceptual confusion which has plagued the distinction typically associated with the questions “of whether and to what extent an image or schema involves consciousness” (pp. 21, 22). The critical question that Gallagher raises is whether conscious awareness of one’s own body is always intentionally present, or as part of an intentional state of affairs (p. 27). When the body appears in the attentional field of consciousness, the issue of ownership is usually already settled (p. 28). In other words, one does not require a “presence of mind” or higher-level of reflection to recognize one’s self as one’s self: this knowledge is already built into the structure of experience (p. 29). Body image, on Gallagher’s conception “consists of a system of perceptions, attitudes, and beliefs pertaining to one’s own body” (p. 24). By contrast, “a body schema is a system of sensory-motor capacities that function without awareness or the necessity of perceptual monitoring” (p. 24). Put another way, the distinction roughly corresponds to having a belief, whereas in the latter case we are talking about a capacity.
Gallagher examines the BI-BS distinction in light of the results of clinical case studies. One such case concerns that of patient “IW” who suffered from an acute sensory neuropathy below the neck with the consequence that he had no proprioceptive sense of posture or limb location. To compensate, consciousness or “presence of mind” encroaches upon or micro-manages one’s motor abilities, which under normal circumstances is less energetically self-monitored in the background. The moral that Gallagher takes from such cases is “that conscious experience is itself constrained and shaped by my prenoetic motility, but conscious control does not directly shape movement” (p. 64). Gallagher discuses the role played by the body image in neonate imitation, and the development of the Self opening up the long standing debate as to whether the body schema is an acquired or innate phenomenon. For Gallagher certain aspects are certainly innate, re-invoking the moral he takes from the case of IW.
Gallagher also considers the long standing puzzle of aplasic phantom limbs. The controversy divides as follows. If a BS is acquired then aplasic phantoms are unlikely. If, however, one subscribes to the innate theory, then aplasic phantoms are a distinct possibility. Some argue that the same empirical data may also be interpreted as supporting an alternative hypothesis in which body image is learnt from sensory input. This doesn’t affect Gallagher’s point. The idea is that if patients without limbs have the sensations of having limbs, the inference to be drawn is that our sensations are embodied by the brain activity that receives messages from the limb, and not by the neural activity in the limb itself. If the embodiment of our sensation is distributed throughout the nervous system would we not expect such a phenomenon? All that should matter is that the conscious self has a broad sense of what the entire situated and embodied agent can and can not do and that surely structures and informs our sense of who we are. So, a patient fitted with a new prosthetic leg now has an ability which must rapidly alter and catch up with his or her bundle of ‘‘taken-for-granted’’ skills, knowledge, and abilities. One’s sense of location is not simply a function of our beliefs about the location of our body: it is the two-way cybernetic looping between brain, body, and world that matters. Knowledge includes knowledge of the constraints and possibilities of the human body’s interaction with the world, a notion that chimes very nicely with Arthur Glenberg’s research (not cited by Gallagher) at the Laboratory for Embodied Cognition at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. In a nutshell, Glenberg suggests that an ability to understand sentences seems to incorporate an agent’s knowledge about how its body might interact with objects in its environment. Gallagher does pose some profoundly intriguing questions concerning the relationship between embodiment and language. Returning to the case of “IW” Gallagher observes that “the self-organizing intentionality of language, including gesture, remains intact” because gesticulatory language is not dependent upon body schemas (p. 126).
Towards the end of the book Gallagher supplements what he concedes is a somewhat static conception of the BS/BI distinction with a more dynamic temporal version based upon research on movement disorders associated with chronic schizophrenia. Despite patients invoking a third-party as “causing” certain actions, they misidentify a sense of ownership with a sense of agency (p. 175). In consideration of this condition Gallagher takes both neuroscientists and philosophers to task for unnecessarily positing an additional layer of monitoring or “hyperreflection” (p. 183, 203). They appear to fall foul of an infinite regress, a humuncular-type explanation generated by Cartesian idea that there is some central or ultimate place in the brain where something like an “I” or the Self attends to and witnesses consciousness. Gallagher is of the view that schizophrenia is a much more global condition since often patients feel alienated not just from thought and action, but also from their own body, skin, saliva and even their name (p. 204). Gallagher makes the critical point that “’the intention to think’ is not something separate from thinking itself; it is included in the very structure of thought . . . [t]he schizophrenic does not discover alien thoughts by means of a metarepresentational introspection.”
Fundamental to Gallagher’s discussion is his phenomenological approach. Gallagher’s understanding of phenomenology is best characterized as a naturalized phenomenology, what he terms “front-loaded,” the idea being that phenomenological insights should inform experimental design (pp.30-32). Methodologically speaking, phenomenology acknowledges the idea of the irreducibility of the structure of lived experience. This conception goes some way to countering the view historical view that phenomenology is merely equivalent to subjective introspectionism and as such has been dismissed by many naturalists as non-scientific and disreputable. Much has changed since neurobiologist Francisco Varela’s combative defense of phenomenology some 10 years ago: a recent search in PubMed returning almost 2,000 references to “phenomenology.” Indeed, a case can be made that cognitive science’s embracing of phenomenological concerns emanates not so much from an engagement with ideas associated with one or another variant of phenomenology but more as general response to empirical questions faced within science itself. Furthermore, to deny that a first-person phenomenology has no place in a science of consciousness is absurd: as Bernard Baars, the theoretical neurobiologist puts it, “There is already a field of systematic phenomenology, and it’s called ‘psychology.’”
Embodiment, a well entrenched paradigm within computer science and artificial intelligence circles, challenges the notion of the body as merely an antenna-like device, a receptacle for somatosensory and sensorimotor input. Gallagher presents a case for the idea that spatio-temporally located pragmatic agents are defined by the very construction and shape of the body. This said, the notion of embodiment it is not immune from conceptual ambiguity. What precisely does it mean to be embodied? Can any criteria be specified? Embodiment raises interesting corollary philosophical questions such as “would entities that display human-like mental properties have similarly human bodies?” But such esoteric discussion would have limited appeal outside of philosophy. It would have been useful had Gallagher offered a brief survey of the various senses of embodiment: to many the positing of embodiment may seem an unnecessarily stated tautology. Gallagher’s target must surely be traditional artificial intelligence circles and philosophers of mind who are of the view that the mind is only contingently dependent on the brain, the implication being that a mind can be studied independently of the body and instantiated in any material.
The positive message of this book is that the notion of embodiment should be factored into research design, mediating overly reductionist and overly inflationist approaches (p. 2, 152). Gallagher argues that a multi-dimensional picture of human consciousness rests upon a multi-pronged approach – developmental, neurological, pathological and phenomenological – none to the exclusion of any other, thereby ensuring a philosophical and a scientific modesty. Gerald Edelman’s “neural Darwinism” takes seriously the idea that minds develop through interactions with their environment as does psychiatrist Bruce Wexler. Embodiment theory might a useful conceptual guide to neuroscience to show that the neural networks spread throughout the body are not modally different from the ones encased within the cranium. Though these neural networks aren’t just “in the head,” they perform many functions that could be described as cognitive. Neurologist William Seeley, interviewed in Scientific American (November 2005, p. 100-101), appears to give some credence to this notion when he says: “[But] I can never get away from living in my body or representing the fact that I’m the same person I was 10 seconds or 10 years ago. I can never escape that, so that network must be busy.” Indeed, there is a whole range of peripheral nerves consisting of axons from primary sensory neurons, lower motor neurons and preganglionic and postganglionic autonomic neurons.
Gallagher’s work might well fall on deaf ears. On the one hand, clinicians are not typically driven by philosophical considerations. On the other hand, why would scientists want empirical data refracted through a non-scientist? It will be noticed that Gallagher has only in passing (p. 30) referred to anorexia nervosa, surely a paradigmatic condition that would invoke his BS/BI distinction.
By way of conclusion, the publisher should be commended on refraining from posting the usual dust-jacket hyperbole – Gallagher’s book does exactly what the title advertises – and this is perfectly in accord with Gallagher’s low-key manner. The breadth and depth of Gallagher’s learning is astonishing, assimilating a voluminous literature across the empirical sciences and philosophy, tempered with lovely flourishes of historical sensitivity. Whether Gallagher has made a convincing case for clinical practitioners, remains an open question – as a research program, embodied cognition is only now reaching early maturity. If, however, one is motivated to explore the notion of embodiment further, then the courtesy should be extended to Gallagher (in advance of the similarly titled How the Body Shapes the Way We Think by computer scientists Rolf Pfeifer and Josh Bongard). Few have a deeper or broader understanding of the concept of embodiment than Gallagher.
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Has liberty a place in Hobbes’ philosophy?
In memory of Paul Hirst
(Paul was the only member in the School of Politics and Sociology that ”got it”. He never allowed his own ideological predelictions to colour his approach to students’ work – he relished giving a fair and insightful account of positions he didn’t hold to, which I noticed confused students who were there precisely because of Paul’s viewpoint. Indeed, he once told me that he thought it tiresome that the departmental profile was so ideologically homogenous – Birkbeck obituary – Guardian obituary).
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In this article I argue that while civil peace, not freedom, is Hobbes’ major political value, his political philosophy, secures a number of dimensions of freedom to the citizen. I further suggest, as an endpoint, that if we read Hobbes prelusively – with a forward eye to the potentialities of his position – we can see his political philosophy as an early text for liberalism.
I. Freedom: Metaphysical and Political
“Liberty” is a term of both political and metaphysical reference. In metaphysics it relates to free will – I am free if, in doing an action, I could have acted differently if I had chosen, and if I could have chosen otherwise than I did. The issue of metaphysical liberty or free will concerns the very basic conditions of human agency, far beyond just the political domain. Hobbes had definite views about this issue, but in this article I will concentrate on his ideas concerning political freedom – the domain of restrictions on action that arise between one person and another and between the citizen and the state.
For Hobbes the primary political value – the goal set for politics – is social peace, not freedom. On the other hand, that until we analyse the idea of freedom, there’s no substance in putting social peace first. The priority of social peace can be rephrased in terms of freedom – i.e. freedom from a life “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, the Hobbesian socail jungle of the state of nature with its constant fear of violent death. So we have to make some analysis of freedom.
II. Political Freedom: Hobbes’ Ambiguities
Hobbes uses different definitions of liberty for different circumstances. Wernham (1960: 123-124) offers four different senses of freedom in Hobbes. Consider these senses illustrated by a game of chess:
1. If a man is capable of deliberation as to whether or not he can play, then using Wernham’s phrase, this might be called “freedom of choice”.
2. If he is not obliged to play or not to play this is “freedom of obligation”.
3. As a result of deliberation he wants to play from a desire to derive pleasure from playing, then this is “freedom from compulsion”.
4. If in going to play he meets no obstacle, this is “freedom with no external impediment to motion”.
Clearly, an agent cannot be free in all four senses at the same time.
III. Political Freedom: Hobbes’ Central View: Freedom as Non-Impediment
It’s plain that Hobbes has a basic notion of liberty as non-obstruction. Hobbes finds it useful to adopt one definition of liberty for the state of nature and another for civil society. Pennock (1965) belives that the two definitions can be reduced, au fond, to the same.
For Hobbes, liberty is consistent with fear (Leviathan, 136). According to Hobbes, if a person is robbed at gunpoint, he would be acting freely. It is not the robber (external), but the fear (internal), that constitutes the impediment. So for Hobbes, a voluntary action and a free action are one and the same. It is clear that Hobbes needs to draw the line between voluntary and involuntary acts; that is, between those where the time of causation moves through the mind and those where it does not (for a crisp and lively discussion on this topic see J.W.N. Watkins, Hobbes’ System of Ideas, chapter 7). It is easy to see Hobbes’ conception of liberty as to be consistent with causal necessity (Leviathan, 108) and its implications for political liberty without delving into the philosophy of mind: absence of external impediments to voluntary motion is what Hobbes took human liberty to be.
IV. Freedom, Sovereignty and Civil Peace
On the surface, Leviathan offers little hope for freedom: (1) civil peace, not freedom, is the main goal of politics; and (2) Leviathan enjoys absolute sovereignty which equals (a) predominant power which, through the peculiarities of Hobbes’ moral philosophy, (b) cannot be employed unjustly. This point has to be made clear in a vital piece of scene-setting.
V. Freedom: The Deeper Picture
If that’s what liberty is, non-impediment, we can subdivide its political application: (a) there’s the question of freedom between citizens, and (b) there’s the question of freedom between citizen and sovereign (how much freedom does Leviathan leave the citizen?)
Between citizens Leviathan has to secure social peace. The sovereign guarantees – which is the whole point of setting him up – a minimum of non-obstruction between one person and another. The level of obstruction described in Hobbes’ account of the state of nature no longer can occur, thanks to Leviathan.
Between citizen and state the position is more complicated. One thing on which one needs to get absolutely clear, and which most students never understand, is that nothing follows for the extent of citizen’s freedom from the fact that Leviathan has absolute sovereignty. Absolute sovereignty on Hobbes’ account means that the sovereign is not democratically accountable, cannot act unjustly, and so on. But says precisely nothing about how far the sovereign will interfere with the citizen’s activities.
One thing Hobbes says is that the liberty of the subject depends on the silence of the laws. That is, where there isn’t an express prohibition, you can do what you like (within the contraints of the laws of nature, which bind the civil state).
A politically significant implication of this conception of liberty is that there is no loss of liberty in obeying a command from fear of the consequences of disobeying it. A man’s liberty is reduced if something external alters the endeavour itself without opposing the behavior initiated by this altered endeavour. On this view, laws do not take away libery, provided they are simple enough and few enough to be easily known and remembered, so that we do not land in gaol through incidental transgressions of them (XIII, 15; and p. 179).
Another point is that Hobbes is aware of the need for political pragmatism. He stresses that it is not in the sovereign’s own interest to rule in an arbitrarily harsh, repressive way. For if he he does, people will see no great gain from obeying the sovereign rather than reverting to the state of nature, or at least combining to oust the present sovereign and getting another one. Hobbes says that there is an irreducible degree of freedom of thought since our minds are not open to Leviathan’s inspection.
However, there is an ambiguity in Hobbes. On the one hand he says: we need to secure civil peace, and the way to do that is to have an absolute sovereign who sees rules through general laws. These general laws apply equally to all; so, whatever liberty they allow is equal liberty. How much liberty do they allow? These general laws implement the 19 laws of nature which are set out in Leviathan (chapters 14-15). Those laws are not consistent with a repressive sovereign who greatly restricts liberty.
On the other hand, Hobbes stresses the extreme importance of civil peace as the major value to be secured by the political system; and there’s a definite mood in Hobbes in which he suggests by the strongest implication that the advantages of having an absolute sovereign, in respect of securing civil peace, are so great, so rationally suasive, that you’d do better to have even a repressive absolute sovereign , who doesn’t follow general rules and implement the laws of nature, than to have any form of government short of absolute sovereignty – since any other government will endanger civil peace.
VI. Hobbes and Liberalism: Hobbes as a Forerunner of Liberalism
It’s a common error to mistake the nature of liberalism. Of course “liberalism” is a term with many meanings, some unrelated and not at all compatible. Often it’s taken in the sense of an ideology for which, like anarchism, freedom is the major value – though different from anarchism in recognizing a role for the state; freedom of contract, association, thought, belief and expression are generally regarded as the specific freedoms into which liberal freedom resolves itself. On the radical Left, liberalism is regarded as superficial becuase economic and social equalities are neglected (or even defended!) in ways that make the liberal freedoms empty for most people.
But it seems to me that this characterization misses the heart of philosophical liberalism. For a more accurate picture of suchliberalism, note the six tenets of liberalism listed by Richard Flathman (1989, pp. 49-50).
1. Human beings are purposive, goal seeking creatures whose actions and patterns of action cannot be understood apart from their conceptions of good.
2. Conceptions of good and goals of action are irreducibly plural (c.f. Lawrence 1989, p, 37-38).
3. There is a scarcity of at least some of the goods that human beings seek and of the resources necessary to effective pursuit of those goods.
4. Hence there is certain to be disagreement and competition, and very likely, conflict.
5. Disagreement, competition, and conflict neither can nor should be eliminated, but conflict must be contained within non-destructive limits.
6. The primary objective of politics is to promote an ordering of human interaction which allows each person the greatest possible freedom to pursue goals compatible with effective constraints on destructive conflict.
Plainly, on these lines, Hobbes ia a liberal. He accepts Flathman’s tenets 1-6 – and his absolute sovereign is one way of promoting the primary objective of liberal politics (see tenet 6).
Part of the history of liberalism since Hobbes has been the quest for an alternative solution for there is an obvious danger that the absolute sovereign will try to impose his or her own conception of the good on everyone else. For Hobbes, the risk is worth taking, because he hold the extereme view that the absolute sovereign is the only alternative to anarchy. But if we reject that view, the game is open to look for another way of promoting the primary objective of liberal politics. One direction this question has taken is that of constitutionalism.
I should, however, like to prevent one misunderstanding. Some have argued that the liberal must reject a Hobbesian absolute sovereign because liberalism is democratic. Actually, Hobbes does allow absolute sovereignty to reside in a democratic assembly, but he reckons its chances of success are pretty low. That aside, the deeper point is that the relation of liberalism to democratic politics, in spite of the ease with which the phrase “liberal democracies” is apt to slide off the tongue, is highly problematic. In my view, democracy does not entail liberalism. Democracy is only “a nudge and a wink” in the direction of liberalism.
References
Hobbes (1651/1991). Leviathan, ed. R. Tuck. Cambridge University Press.
Flatham, R.E. (1989). Towards a Liberalism. Cornell.
Pennock, J.R. (1965). Hobbes’ Confusing “Clarity” – the Case of “Liberty” Hobbes Studies, ed. K. Thomas, Blackwell.
Watkins, J.W.N. (1973). Hobbes’ System of Ideas, London.
Wernham, A.G. (1960). Liberty and Obligation in Hobbes. Hobbes Studies, ed. K.C. Brown, Blackwell.
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Some other works-in-progress
I have good drafts of four papers that I’ll post as and when I’ve polished them up:
1. Social organicism in the political philosophy of Bernard Bosanquet
Abstract: This paper is an attempt to retrieve one part of Bosanquet’s political philosophy, the positive part which I term his “Social Organicism”. The most effective way to introduce this organicism is to locate it at three points of divergence between Bosanquet and the British tradition of political philosophy. These divergencies will yield three components to Bosanquet’s Social Organicism. The aim of this paper is to set out these components and use them to construct Bosanquet’s solution to the problem of political obligation.
The positive task of Bosanquet’s political philosophy is then to vindicate his view of the conditions of individual well-being, which relies on his conception of the individual, which in turn underlies his view of consent and to do this in a way as to arrive at a state with attributes (b1), (b2) and (c1).
This article focus mainly on this positive aspect of Bosanquet’s political philosophy. This aspect has not been examined in recent times – and older commentators who investigated it tended to subsume it under a general discussion of Bosanquest’s idealist metaphysics. I hold the view that Bosanquet is a considerable political philosopher, who employs an interesting and neglected philosophical psychology; and that his contribution here can be translated into more accessible language from the rather opaque metaphysical language and terminology he himself employs. I will however, refer to his metaphysical theory as so far as necessary to make Bosanquets’ position intelligible. An extended discussion of Bosanquet’s metaphysics would be beyond the ambit of this article, and would take us beyond the confines of political philosophy.
I shall attempt a critical examination and not merely an exposition of Bosanquet’s social organicism. But the point must be made that since there is no (or not much)* recent exposition of Bosanquet’s political philsophy, and since Bosanquet himself often fails to use the clearest language, a real effort is needed to recover the system of ideas embodied in his social organicism. Criticism can only come into play when the relevant concepts and structure of argument have been brought to light.
The central text to be examined is Bosanquet’s Philosophical Theory of the State. Reference will be made to other texts as appropriate.
The structure of this article is as follows:
Section 2: Individual and Society
Section 3: Society and State
Section 4: State and Individual
Section 5: Conclusions
If we follow this structure we shall be able to assemble the three main components of Bosanquet’s social organicism: his view of the the type of consent relevant to the state’s moral authority, his conception of the individual relevant to politics; and his view of the conditions of individual well-being. From this we can construct his solution to the problem of political obligation.
*I went up to Cambridge to see Dorothy Emmet ostensibly to talk about Bosanquet. Dorothy then, was 86, and sharp as a whistle, with a book on Whitehead about to (or maybe had just) come out. Well as the lunch progressed and the wine flowed, we became engrossed in a conversation about the history of 20th Century philosophy. Bosanquet took on a minor supporting role. I particularly recall her telling me about Whitehead’s encouragement (there were very few professional women philosophers then); her sharing a cab with Wittgenstein who was in a sullen mood (now there’s a surprise); and a whole raft of anecdotes. What was supposed to be a lunch became a five hour session followed by tea, followed by dinner (all the food had been prepared in advance – it’s as if she knew this wasn’t going to be only lunch). All this took place at the recently deceased Richard Braithwaite’s house, which I vividly recall. Dorothy was the sweetest, most unassuming and most gracious hostess I could have encountered. And that’s aside from being a super sharp and humane intellect. I wrote to her in 2000 to invite her down to London for the inaugural conference of the Michael Oakeshott Association. I received a letter back, dictated by her to an assistant, saying how kind the invitation was and that she really wasn’t up to it. It turns out that she was in terminal decline (couldn’t hold a pen), and was in an old-age home. Yet she still deemed it important to respond to me. For more about Dorothy see the Guardian obituary and the Lucy Cavendish College archive.
A postscript to Emmett and Wittgenstein which I found here:
While in Newcastle, Wittgenstein did little or no philosophical work. He had begun to doubt whether he was any longer capable of it, and he found laboratory work very demanding. It was, however, during this period that he appeared unexpectedly at a philosophy lecture given by the young Dorothy Emmett at Newcastle.
She had been invited by Freda Herbert, a chemical pathologist, to give a paper to the philosophy group that met in her flat. Dorothy Emmett stayed in the Grand Hotel (currently Bar Oz) in the Haymarket, and was enjoying the unusual wartime luxury of a bath with unlimited hot water, when the phone rang. It was Freda Herbert asking if it was all right for a stranger to come to the meeting. Dorothy Emmett felt that this was an unnecessary interruption to her bath and said so in no uncertain terms. It was only when she arrived to give her paper that she was told that the stranger was Wittgenstein. He had not yet arrived and she had hopes of getting through the paper before he appeared. However, he walked in when she had scarcely begun. She recognised him and was somewhat unnerved. Somehow she managed to finish her talk, whereupon Wittgenstein said “Now lets do some philosophy”, and proceeded to take over the meeting, completely ignoring the subject of her paper!
2. Has liberty a place in Hobbes’ philosophy?
Abstract: I argue that while civil peace, not freedom, is Hobbes’ major political value, his political philsophy, secures a number of dimensions of freedom to the citizen. I further suggest, as an endpoint, that if we read Hobbes prelusively – with a forward eye to the potentialities of his position – we can see his political philosophy as an early text for liberalism.
(Trivia: I found it astonishing that the then vicar of Malmesbury Abbey (1998) had no idea who one of Malmesbury’s most famous sons was. I also found that Trinity College Oxford’s library had their first edition of Leviathan in a glass display cabinet open at some random page and not at Hobbes’ most famous paragraph from Chapter XIII of Leviathan:
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry, because the fruit thereof is uncertain: and consequently no culture of the earth; no navigation, nor use of the commodities that may be imported by sea; no commodious building; no instruments of moving and removing such things as require much force; no knowledge of the face of the earth; no account of time; no arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
I’m pleased to say that the then librarian who was kind enough to show me Trinity’s library and stash of silverware immediately rectified this dreadful oversight. I don’t know if this book is still housed there: the librarian expressed his concern about the pollution in Oxford detriorating old master works.
3. Is JS Mill’s theory of liberty inconsistent with his utilitarian premisses?
4. What meaning, if any, can be ascribed to the terms “Hellenism” and “Hellenization”?
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