The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy
The Rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes and Bernard Lamy

Author: John T. Harwood

Publisher: SIU Press

Published: 2009-03-10

Total Pages: 428

ISBN-13: 0809386828

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Makes accessible to modern readers the 17th-century rhetorics of Thomas Hobbes (1588–1677) and Bernard Lamy (1640–1715) Hobbes’ A Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique, the first English translation of Aristotle’s rhetoric, reflects Hobbes’ sense of rhetoric as a central instrument of self-defense in an increasingly fractious Commonwealth. In its approach to rhetoric, which Hobbes defines as “that Faculty by which wee understand what will serve our turne, concerning any subject, to winne beliefe in the hearer,” the Briefe looks forward to Hobbes’ great political works De Cive and Leviathan. Published anonymously in France as De l’art de parler, Lamy’s rhetoric was translated immediately into English as The Art of Speaking. Lamy’s long association with the Port Royalists made his works especially attractive to English readers because Port Royalists were engaged in a vicious quarrel with the Jesuits during the last half of the 17th century.

Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes
Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes

Author: Timothy Raylor

Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA

Published: 2018

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 0198829698

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Thomas Hobbes claimed to have founded the discipline of civil philosophy. This book offers a new reading of his intellectual development, arguing that he was dubious about the place of rhetoric in civil society and came to see it as a pernicious presence within philosophy - a position from which he did not retreat.

From Humanism to Hobbes
From Humanism to Hobbes

Author: Quentin Skinner

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-01-25

Total Pages: 447

ISBN-13: 1108656218

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The aim of this collection is to illustrate the pervasive influence of humanist rhetoric on early-modern literature and philosophy. The first half of the book focuses on the classical rules of judicial rhetoric. One chapter considers the place of these rules in Shakespeare's The Merchant of Venice, while two others concentrate on the technique of rhetorical redescription, pointing to its use in Machiavelli's The Prince as well as in several of Shakespeare's plays, notably Coriolanus. The second half of the book examines the humanist background to the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. A major new essay discusses his typically humanist preoccupation with the visual presentation of his political ideas, while other chapters explore the rhetorical sources of his theory of persons and personation, thereby offering new insights into his views about citizenship, political representation, rights and obligations and the concept of the state.

Hobbes's Theory of the Will
Hobbes's Theory of the Will

Author: Jürgen Overhoff

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 278

ISBN-13: 0847696499

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In Hobbes's Theory of the Will, Jurgen Overhoff reveals the religious, ethical, and political consequences of Thomas Hobbes's doctrine of volition. The author gracefully describes how Hobbes's thought was governed by assumptions based firmly in Galilean natural philosophy and orthodox Protestant theology. Overhoff also demonstrates how his subject used materialist eschatology and an absolutist political theory to resolve the social and ethical predicaments that coincided with these assumptions. Finally, Overhoff provides a chronological study of the numerous philosophical, theological, religious and political aspects of Hobbes's idea of the will and situates Hobbes's doctrine within the context of the most important responses and objections put forward by his critics.

Author: S. A. Lloyd

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2013-08-31

Total Pages: 357

ISBN-13: 052116978X

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This volume demonstrates the enduring relevance of the philosophy of Thomas Hobbes for the political and social problems we face today.

Saving Persuasion
Saving Persuasion

Author: Bryan Garsten

Publisher: Harvard University Press

Published: 2009-03-31

Total Pages: 302

ISBN-13: 9780674021686

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In today's increasingly polarized political landscape it seems that fewer and fewer citizens hold out hope of persuading one another. Even among those who have not given up on persuasion, few will admit to practicing the art of persuasion known as rhetoric. To describe political speech as "rhetoric" today is to accuse it of being superficial or manipulative. In Saving Persuasion, Bryan Garsten uncovers the early modern origins of this suspicious attitude toward rhetoric and seeks to loosen its grip on contemporary political theory. Revealing how deeply concerns about rhetorical speech shaped both ancient and modern political thought, he argues that the artful practice of persuasion ought to be viewed as a crucial part of democratic politics. He provocatively suggests that the aspects of rhetoric that seem most dangerous--the appeals to emotion, religious values, and the concrete commitments and identities of particular communities--are also those which can draw out citizens' capacity for good judgment. Against theorists who advocate a rationalized ideal of deliberation aimed at consensus, Garsten argues that a controversial politics of partiality and passion can produce a more engaged and more deliberative kind of democratic discourse.

The Trouble with Literature
The Trouble with Literature

Author: Victoria Kahn

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-02-20

Total Pages: 216

ISBN-13: 0192536249

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This book, based on the Clarendon Lectures in English for 2017, argues that the literature of the English Reformation marks a turning point in Western thinking about literature and literariness. But instead of arguing that the Reformation fostered English literature, as scholars have often done, Victoria Kahn claims that literature helped undo the Reformation, with implications for both poetry and belief. Ultimately, literature in the Reformation is one vehicle by which religious belief was itself transformed into a human artifact, whether we understand this as a poetic artifact or a mental fiction. This transformation in turn helped produce the eighteenth-century discipline of aesthetics, with its emphasis on our experience of non-cognitive pleasure in the work of art, and the modern formalist definition of literature, according to which--in the words of one critic--'literature solves no problems and saves no souls.' This modern definition of literature, in short, has a history, this history is intertwined with the problem of belief, and by returning to the fraught years of the late sixteenth and seventeenth century in England, we can come to a new understanding of how the trouble with literature has shaped our discipline. The first lecture contrasts modern and early modern understandings of literature and literariness. The second and third lectures focus on Thomas Hobbes and John Milton. The fourth lecture treats the work of Immanuel Kant, Søren Kierkegaard, and J.M. Coetzee.

Aesthetic Science
Aesthetic Science

Author: Alexander Wragge-Morley

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2020-04-20

Total Pages: 250

ISBN-13: 022668086X

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The scientists affiliated with the early Royal Society of London have long been regarded as forerunners of modern empiricism, rejecting the symbolic and moral goals of Renaissance natural history in favor of plainly representing the world as it really was. In Aesthetic Science, Alexander Wragge-Morley challenges this interpretation by arguing that key figures such as John Ray, Robert Boyle, Nehemiah Grew, Robert Hooke, and Thomas Willis saw the study of nature as an aesthetic project. To show how early modern naturalists conceived of the interplay between sensory experience and the production of knowledge, Aesthetic Science explores natural-historical and anatomical works of the Royal Society through the lens of the aesthetic. By underscoring the importance of subjective experience to the communication of knowledge about nature, Wragge-Morley offers a groundbreaking reconsideration of scientific representation in the early modern period and brings to light the hitherto overlooked role of aesthetic experience in the history of the empirical sciences.

Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration
Humanism and the Rhetoric of Toleration

Author: Gary Remer

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2010-11-01

Total Pages: 334

ISBN-13: 0271042826

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Religious toleration is much discussed these days. But where did the Western notion of toleration come from? In this thought-provoking book Gary Remer traces arguments for religious toleration back to the Renaissance, demonstrating how humanist thinkers initiated an intellectual tradition that has persisted even to our present day. Although toleration has long been recognized as an important theme in Renaissance humanist thinking, many scholars have mistakenly portrayed the humanists as proto-Englightenment rationalists and nascent liberals. Remer, however, offers the surprising conclusion that humanist thinking on toleration was actually founded on the classical tradition of rhetoric. It was the rhetorician's commitment to decorum, the ability to argue both sides of an issue, and the search for an acceptable epistemological standard in probability and consensus that grounded humanist arguments for toleration. Remer also finds that the primary humanist model for a full-fledged theory of toleration was the Ciceronian rhetorical category of sermo (conversation). The historical scope of this book is wide-ranging. Remer begins by focusing on the works of four humanists: Desiderius Erasmus, Jacobus Acontius, William Chillingworth, and Jean Bodin. Then he considers the challenge posed to the humanist defense of toleration by Thomas Hobbes and Pierre Bayle. Finally, he shows how humanist ideas have continued to influence arguments for toleration even after the passing of humanism&—from John Locke to contemporary American discussions of freedom of speech.