Empirical Hobbes: Science and Political Theory in the Works of Thomas Hobbes
| dc.contributor.advisor | Baumgold, Deborah | |
| dc.contributor.author | Harding, Ryan | |
| dc.date.accessioned | 2021-09-13T18:34:11Z | |
| dc.date.available | 2021-09-13T18:34:11Z | |
| dc.date.issued | 2021-09-13 | |
| dc.description.abstract | This dissertation adjudicates the role of empiricism in the science and political theory of Thomas Hobbes. It accords “empiricism” status as a separate, coherent motivation, apart from others (like geometricization), which helped to orientate Hobbes, shaping his political theory and filtering into his scientific ideas and practices. The dissertation demonstrates that experience played a more dynamic, if misunderstood role in early Hobbesian science than is accounted by interpreters, and disaggregates the different meanings Hobbes gave “experience,” particularly in The Elements of Law (1640) and in the first (1642) and second (1647) editions of De cive. This demonstration culminates in a treatment of Leviathan (1651) that challenges methodological interpretations, and offers, instead, that the text’s exposition was, in part, crafted to address a pair of substantive concerns about the effects of un-empirical speech and causal myopia in human decision-making. The dissertation also considers the relationship between serial composition, the method Hobbes used to construct many of his texts, and his empiricism. The study of this relationship yields two principal findings. First, serial composition encouraged changes in Hobbes’s empiricism, prompting the development of new empirical concepts, analytical-empirical strategies, and changes in his political methodology. Second, the practice resulted in layered, bricolage texts, all responding to different features of Hobbes’s world, and in which are embedded different understandings of what the empirical study of that world entails. The empirical “drift” of Hobbes’s works potentially makes assembling some set of them into a whole and the search for systematicity in Hobbes’s political theory a futile task. Thus, the dissertation questions the interpretive utility of the methodological statements elaborated in De corpore (1655). A close analysis of the statements also offers an entry-point into a discussion of Hobbes’s practice of retrojecting new, emergent understandings of science and scientific method back onto previous texts. This practice of retrojection, the analysis shows, went hand-in-hand with and, to an extent, stemmed from Hobbes’s use of serial composition, combined with his empiricism. The dissertation also features a revised chronology of the Elementa Philosophiae, Hobbes’s plan for a trilogy of texts that would elaborate the elements of his philosophy. | en_US |
| dc.identifier.uri | https://hdl.handle.net/1794/26614 | |
| dc.language.iso | en_US | |
| dc.publisher | University of Oregon | |
| dc.rights | All Rights Reserved. | |
| dc.subject | Empiricism | en_US |
| dc.subject | Experience | en_US |
| dc.subject | Political Theory | en_US |
| dc.subject | Science | en_US |
| dc.subject | Serial Composition | en_US |
| dc.subject | Thomas Hobbes | en_US |
| dc.title | Empirical Hobbes: Science and Political Theory in the Works of Thomas Hobbes | |
| dc.type | Electronic Thesis or Dissertation | |
| thesis.degree.discipline | Department of Political Science | |
| thesis.degree.grantor | University of Oregon | |
| thesis.degree.level | doctoral | |
| thesis.degree.name | Ph.D. |
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