James Hamilton

This book approaches Hobbes's philosophy from a completely new perspective: his creativity. Creativity is the production of something which experts consider to be original, valuable and of high quality. James Hamilton explores Hobbes's creativity by focusing on his development, personality, and motivation in the context of his culture and environment, and on the ways in which he thought creatively, as inferred from his writings. Identification of the ideas which Hobbes drew upon is an important part of the study for two reasons. First, they are necessary to determine which of Hobbes's ideas and theories are original and which are not. Second, analysis of his creativity requires an understanding of the ideas from which he drew. Hamilton concludes that Hobbes became a great philosopher because of his creative virtuosity.

Hobbes created the state of nature, the condition in which people live before the establishment of the civil state, as the civil state’s polar opposite. In its purest form the state of nature represents savagery, constant danger of violent death, and moral uncertainty, while the civil state represents a life of security, civilization, comfort, and relative plenty. Hobbes’s task was to justify his new concept in a compelling, multidimensional way, drawing a portrait by the cross fertilization of ideas from different domains. His solution appears to be a reflection of divergent thinking, seeking multiple solutions to a problem. His development of the state of nature also seems to belong to a process of sepconic articulation by which he used the two antitheses to imagine and conceptualize a third state, the attenuated state of nature, where families and people no longer live alone. We examine six components of his theory in turn: the concept of the state of nature, the theory of history as progress, the idea of anarchy, the concepts of moral relativity and subjective right, the effective equality of people in the state of nature, and a group of passions that promote competition and war.

Creative genius requires intelligence but intelligence is not enough. Most intelligent people are satisfied with mastering and working in a specific domain, not in challenging its received wisdom and striking out on their own. A special personality is required for high creativity. But a person’s personality can be inferred only from examining her behavior and experience from her reactions to the environment. This chapter is about Hobbes and his environment. I will consider his psychological, educational, and intellectual development, the relationship between his personality traits and his creativity, his motivation, and how his environment contributed to the psychological resources which he drew upon in developing his philosophy.

This chapter focuses not on the whole gamut of Hobbes’s creative insights on the civil state or commonwealth, but on the creative aspects of an important feature of his philosophical argumentation which I call adversarial thinking. By this I mean that he employs philosophical ideas and theories that attack opposing views and counter, replace, rule out, or otherwise undermine them. I will consider as an example of his robust adversarial thinking his attack on the European theoretical tradition of popular sovereignty. The general form of his adversarial thinking often appears as a broad philosophical position supported by layers of arguments requiring different individual subtasks for which he marshals traditional views and invents new arguments to solve the problem at hand. It may be philosophically problematic to heap up arguments with little regard to their mutual coherence, but doing so no doubt in his judgment enhanced the prospects of convincing his seventeenth-century audience. It also may represent strong divergent thinking, which can produce many different useful ideas, demonstrating his cognitive fluency, flexibility, and originality, which can lead to creativity. Taken together, several aspects of Hobbes’s adversarial thinking constitute a formidable creative force reinforcing the goals of his philosophical project.

Hobbes viewed people as just matter in motion and developed a thoroughly materialistic account of human psychology. In the first part of this chapter we examine his theory of cognition, which seems to have drawn upon ancient, medieval, and Renaissance ideas as well as contemporary scientific discoveries. Hobbes’s model of the cognitive faculties seems to have been the result of cross fertilization of ideas from different domains and different parts of the same domain, and its creativity lies principally in its novel integration of ideas and theories. His most important achievement was to replace the traditional account of higher intelligence as a process of the rational soul, which he rejected, with a revolutionary concept of reason as a form of addition and subtraction, and of science as a form of addition and subtraction using language. In the second part of the chapter we turn to Hobbes’s account of the passions. The most original is that of felicity, which seems to be a reimagining, by a dialectical process, of the ancient concept of eudaimonia or felicity along worldly lines suggested by Francis Bacon.

In Chap. 7 we first review the development of salient aspects of his extraordinary personal, interpersonal, and material resources. In the following four sections we will review our findings on his creativity in four aspects of his philosophy, his theory of cognition and the passions, his theory of moral relativity and the role of the sovereign, his theory of the state of nature, and his theory of the civil state and his reply to the theory of popular sovereignty. Then I will address what appear to be transformational aspects of his creativity, the contributions of this study to the work of philosophers and psychologists, and topics for further research. Finally, I will suggest that Hobbes was creative in so many different ways that it is fitting to think of him as a creative virtuoso, that an understanding of his creative processes adds an important new dimension to our understanding of his thought, and that his creativity and originality are the principal reasons that we prize his philosophy so highly today.

Ancient Pyrrhonism had an enormous impact on intellectuals in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. The Pyrrhonists opposed all other philosophical schools on the grounds that their doctrines are all equally plausible and we can never know which is true. The destructive consequences of a skeptical doctrine that questioned the value of all knowledge undermined traditional philosophy and raised doubts about the validity of the new science. I will show that Hobbes co-opted it for his own purposes by integrating Pyrrhonist and traditional ideas and arguments in his philosophy, though he was not a skeptic in the Pyrrhonist sense. The result was the emergence of new principles and constructs by a sepconic articulation process, and the radical transformation of traditional moral and political philosophy. The result is one of his greatest philosophical contributions, moral subjectivity (the individual determines what is moral), and relativity (each person has his own good and bad) within the context of a theory of immutable natural law.

Although Thomas Hobbes is famous for his political philosophy, he is considered one of the greatest and most innovative philosophers in the history of Western culture. Commentators naturally have expended enormous time and effort studying his philosophy. But they have neglected his creativity. This book addresses that scholarly gap. It presents a study of Hobbes’s philosophy from a new perspective. Our primary interest is Hobbes’s philosophic creativity. Our study will serve to introduce the psychology of creativity to students of the philosophy of Hobbes, and the creativity of a great philosopher to the field of the psychology of creativity. It begins to fill a virtual vacuum in the study of the creative products of philosophers. It provides an account of the influence of Hobbes’s development, personality, and motivation on his creativity, and it offers an assessment of his creative thinking in different areas of his thought. This chapter defines creativity, explains why the traditional rationalistic and Romantic views of it are wrong, describes some types of creative cognition that will occur in our study, and outlines its approach.

_ Source: _Volume 29, Issue 2, pp 129 - 147 Thomas Hobbes’s concept of felicity is a re-imagining of the Hellenistic concept of _eudaimonia_, which is based on the doctrine that people by nature are happy with little. His concept is based instead on an alternative view, that people by nature are never satisfied and it directly challenges the Aristotelian and Hellenistic concepts of _eudaimonia_. I also will suggest that Hobbes developed it from ideas he found in Aristotle’s _Rhetoric_ as well as in Francis Bacon’s critique of ancient moral philosophy in _The Advancement of Learning_.

In this article I propose a way of thinking about aesthetic and artistic verdicts that would keep them distinct from one another. The former are reflections of the kinds of things we prefer and take pleasure in; the latter are reflections of other judgments we make about the kinds of achievements that are made in works of art. In part to support this view of verdicts, I also propose a way of keeping distinct the description, the interpretation, and the evaluation of works of art. (And along the way, I worry about whether we offer the same kinds of interpretations of the objects of our aesthetic pleasures, properly considered, that we clearly do offer with respect to works of art.) The thesis I propose—the achievement model—is not original with me. What is original, perhaps, is that it is posed as an alternative to two other views of artistic evaluation, namely the appeal to “ideal critics” and the appeal to one way of understanding our preferences with regard to works of art. I do not attempt to show that each of these alternatives meets with insuperable problems; but I do indicate what I take to be the substantive content of those problems. In the end, in order to flesh out the thesis I propose, I borrow some material from the literature on human well-being concerning how we determine what an achievement is.