Kant against Hobbes: Reasoning and rhetoric

Journal of Moral Philosophy

Volumn 4, Issue 2, 2007, Pages 207-222

  Slomp, Gabriella ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF ST ANDREWS   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

Civil law; Justice; Morality; Natural law

Indexed keywords

EID: 64249095171     PISSN: 17404681     EISSN: 17455243     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/1740468107079259     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. All references are to Hans Reiss (ed.), Kant's Political Writings (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2nd enlarged edn, 1991). References given to citations in the main body of the text refer to the volume and pagination of the Prussian Academy edition. Corresponding page references to the Reiss edition are given in footnotes
2. Richard Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997)
3. Tuck, The Rights of War and Peace, p. 211
4. Manfred Kuehen, Kant: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 342-43
5. Howard Williams, Kant's Critique of Hobbes: Sovereignty and Cosmopolitanism (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2003)
6. Williams, Kant's Critique of Hobbes, p. 42
7. In 'Against Hobbes' the issue of the external enemies of the people is mentioned briefly at VIII: 298/9 (Kant's Political Writings, p. 80)
8. Kant's Political Writings, p. 84
9. See, for example, David Boonin-Vail, Thomas Hobbes and the Science of Moral Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994)
10. see also S. State, Thomas Hobbes and the Debate over Natural Law and Religion (London: Garland, 1991)
11. For an original and interesting discussion of natural law, see Bernd Ludwig, 'Hobbes's Leviathan as an Epicurean Response to Theistic Natural Law' (paper presented to Twentieth World Congress of Philosophy, Boston, MA, USA, 10-16 August 1998)
12. Thomas Hobbes, On the Citizen, ed. R. Tuck and M. Silverthorne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 132, henceforth referred to as De Cive
13. On the role of rhetoric in Leviathan see David Johnston, The Rhetoric of Leviathan (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986)
14. and Quentin Skinner, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)
15. The first full German translation of Hobbes's Leviathan was published anonymously in 1794. Howard Williams alerts us to the circumstances of the publication and to the short but telling introductory words by the translator who acknowledges the challenge of introducing to the German reader 'a highly suspicious man as Thomas Hobbes'. According to Williams, 'the publication provides a fascinating insight into the political climate of the times and the context within which Kant was writing his political philosophy', Kant's Critique of Hobbes, p. 190ff
16. See also Patricia Springborg's interpretation of Hobbes's Behemoth, 'Behemoth and Hobbes's Science of Just and Unjust', Filozofski Vestnik (Acta Philosophica) XXIV.2 (2003), pp. 267-89
17. Norberto Bobbio, Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993). This work remains for me the best treatment of natural law theory in Hobbes to date
18. This specific natural law is discussed in some detail by Joel Kidder, 'Acknowledgements of Equals', Philosophical Quarterly 33 (1983), pp. 133-46
19. Hobbes, De Cive, IV
20. In De Cive he writes: 'Therefore all men are equal to each other by nature. Our actual inequality has been introduced by civil law' (De Cive, p. 26)