•  5
    According to Hume, the question of the “dignity” or “meanness” of human nature comes down to a comparison of its “different motives or actuating principles”: that is, whether “our selfish and vicious principles” are “predominant above our social and virtuous” (Hume 1987, 84). Hume was responding in part to Hobbes, and comparison between the two philosophers on this question is common, with Hobbes placed on the “selfish” side, and Hume on the other. But, as Hume immediately goes on to say, “There…Read more
  • Hobbes on the Motives of Martyrs
    In Laurens van Apeldoorn & Robin Douglass (eds.), Hobbes on Politics and Religion, Oxford University Press. pp. 79-94. 2018.
  •  16
    From soul to mind in Hobbes’s The Elements of Law
    History of European Ideas 46 (3): 257-275. 2020.
    This paper examines the significance and originality of Hobbes’s use of ‘mind’, rather than ‘soul’, in his writings on human nature. To this end, his terminology in the discussion of the ‘faculties of the mind’ in The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1640) is considered in the context of English-language accounts of the ‘faculties of the soul’ in three widely-read works from the first half of the seventeenth century: Thomas Wright’s The Passions of the Minde in Generall (1604), Robert Burto…Read more
  •  14
    Feminist Perspectives on Hobbes
    with Eva Odzuck
    Hobbes Studies 33 (1): 1-4. 2020.