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3433Hobbes on Language: Propositions, Truth, and AbsurdityIn A. P. Martinich & Kinch Hoekstra (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford University Press. pp. 57-72. 2016.Language was central to Hobbes's understanding of human beings and their mental abilities, and criticism of other philosophers' uses of language became a favorite critical tool for him. This paper connects Hobbes's theories about language to his criticisms of others' language, examining Hobbes's theories of propositions and truth, and how they relate to his claims that various sorts of proposition are absurd. It considers whether Hobbes in fact means anything more by 'absurd' than 'false'. And i…Read more
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53Review of Perez Zagorin, Hobbes and the Law of Nature (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2010 (5). 2010.
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2156Hobbes's Materialism in the Early 1640sBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 13 (3). 2005.I argue that Hobbes isn't really a materialist in the early 1640s (in, e.g., the Third Objections to Descartes's Meditations). That is, he doesn't assert that bodies are the only substances. However, he does think that bodies are the only substances we can think about using imagistic ideas.
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681MaterialismIn S. A. Lloyd (ed.), Continuum Companion to Hobbes, Continuum. 2013.This is a short (1,000 word) introduction to Hobbes's materialism, covering (briefly) such issues as what the relevant notion of materialism is, Hobbes's debate with Descartes, and what Hobbes's arguments for materialism were.
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858Toland, Leibniz, and Active MatterOxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy 6 249-78. 2013.In the early years of the eighteenth century Leibniz had several interactions with John Toland. These included, from 1702 to 1704, discussions of materialism. Those discussions culminated with the consideration of Toland's 1704 Letters to Serena, where Toland argued that matter is necessarily active. In this paper I argue for two main theses about this exchange and its consequences for our wider understanding. The first is that, despite many claims that Toland was at the time of Letters to Seren…Read more
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525Leibniz on the Expression of GodErgo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 2 83-103. 2015.Leibniz frequently uses the notion of expression, but it is not easy to see just how he understood that relation. This paper focuses on the particular case of the expression of God, which is prominent in the 'Discourse on Metaphysics'. The treatment of expression there suggests several questions. Which substances did Leibniz believe expressed God? Why did Leibniz believe those substances expressed God? And did he believe that all substances expressed God in the same way and for the same reasons?…Read more
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1069Toland and Locke in the Leibniz-Burnett CorrespondenceLocke Studies 17 117-141. 2017.Leibniz's correspondence with Thomas Burnett of Kemnay is probably best known for Leibniz's attempts to communicate with Locke via Burnett. But Burnett was also, more generally a source of English intellectual news for Leibniz. As such, Burnett provided an important part of the context in which Locke was presented to and understood by Leibniz. This paper examines the Leibniz-Burnett correspondence, and argues against Jolley's suggestion that "the context in which Leibniz learned about Locke wa…Read more
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948Hobbes on the Signification of Evaluative LanguageHobbes Studies 32 (2): 159-178. 2019.Hobbes repeatedly expressed concerns about moral and political language, e.g., about the bad consequences of various uses and misuses of language. He did not simply focus on the consequences though. He also attempted to understand the problems, using the central semantic notion in his philosophy of language, signification. Hobbes, in both the Elements of Law and Leviathan, argues that a wide variety of terms – including ‘good’, ‘bad’, and the names of virtues and vices – have a double and incons…Read more
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17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
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Thomas Hobbes |
17th/18th Century British Philosophy, Misc |