scholarly journals Anticipating Jean-Jacques Rousseau: the state of nature in the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” by Madame de Graffigny (1747)

2021 ◽  
Vol 27 (3) ◽  
pp. 155-160
Author(s):  
Artem D. Morozov
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
General Interest ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Inca Empire ◽  
Noble Savage ◽  
Moral Qualities ◽  
Intellectual Influence

The article deals with the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” (Lettres d'une Péruvienne, 1747) by Madame de Graffigny, which anticipates many ideas of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, including the notion of state of nature. The main character, a young Peruvian woman, who was taken away to France, embodies the concept of the ‟noble savage”. Unlike civilised Europeans she has high moral qualities, critically evaluates the institutions and customs of her time, and she aspires to the state of nature, though knowledge about this world did not make her happy. Madame de Graffigny uses the Peruvian theme according to the general interest in the age of Enlightenment in the Inca Empire, which was considered as idyllic society, organised under the laws of nature. She tries, like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, to display merits of savages and demerits of civilised Europeans. The intellectual influence of Madame de Graffigny and Jean-Jacques Rousseau on each other is confirmed by their personal contacts. As a result, we claim that the novel ‟Letters from a Peruvian Woman” was influenced by advanced philosophical ideas of the mid-18thcentury – this text stands at the origins of the concept of the ‟state of nature”, which eventually became one of the main terms of Rousseauism.

Hobbes's Voluntarist Theory of Morals

2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-69
Author(s):  
Martin Harvey
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
Moral Concepts ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Human Endeavor ◽  
The Subject

AbstractTwo interpretations of Hobbes's theory of morals dominate the subject: the Egoistic Reading (ER) and the Naturalist Reading (NR). According to ER, all of Hobbes's moral concepts are self-interested at their core. According to NR, Hobbes's Laws of Nature set down genuine moral obligations/virtues both inside of the state of nature and out. This article rejects both of these interpretations in favor of a Voluntarist Reading (VR). On this reading, morality is an artifact of human endeavor, specifically covenanting. Unlike both ER and NR, VR takes seriously Hobbes's claim that there is “no obligation on any man which ariseth not from some act of his own”.

11. Environment

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dale Jamieson
Keyword(s):  
Climate Change ◽  
Academic Writing ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Global Environmental Change ◽  
The State ◽  
Environmental Crisis ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Global Environmental ◽  
History Of

This chapter examines the role of the environment in the history of political theory. The philosophy of nature is an ancient subject. From the pre-Socratics to the present, philosophers have sketched diverse pictures of nature and held various views about nature's relationships to human flourishing. For Aristotle, nature and goodness were closely allied. For Thomas Hobbes, the state of nature was something to be overcome, but the laws of nature directed us how to do it. Jean-Jacques Rousseau idealized the state of nature and thought that it was required for human flourishing. The chapter first considers the doom and gloom that pervaded academic writing about the environment in the late 1960s and early 1970s before discussing themes such as democracy and environmental crisis, global environmental change, climate change, environmentalism, liberalism, and justice. A case study on managing climate change is presented, along with a Key Thinkers box featuring Anil Agarwal.

The Fool's Heart and Hobbes' Head

Dialogue ◽  
1981 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 674-689
Author(s):  
Thomas Scally
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Central Problem ◽  
The Political ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Self Interest

Chapter fifteen of Leviathan is concerned with what Hobbes calls “the laws of nature”; however, it is evident from the start that justice is the central problem of the chapter. Hobbes demonstrates a rather subtle sensitivity to a possible misunderstanding of his views on the state of nature and the function of natural reason by inventing the character of the fool who purports to use Hobbes' own principle of self-interest to deny the existence of justice. The fool may finally be a “straw man” who proposes precisely that argument which Hobbes can quickly refute, but even if this is so, the straw man has Hobbes' face, or one like it, because the line between the views of the fool and those of Hobbes himself is very fine indeed. This section of Leviathan is more significant than it would seem at first glance because it provides an avenue by means of which one can distinguish the political philosophy of Hobbes from that of classical “individualists” such as Callicles and Thrasymachus. It is all too easy to read Hobbes as an elaborate restatement of the sophistic position of Socrates' famous opponents; the example of the fool belies this facile identity and to a certain extent constitutes a refutation of the classical power theorists.

Reason and Reciprocity in Hobbes's Political Philosophy: On Sharon Lloyd's: Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 158-169
Author(s):  
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Basic Principle ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
Moral Obligations ◽  
State Of Nature

AbstractLloyd's book, Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, correctly stresses the deductive element in Hobbes's proofs of the laws of nature. She believes that “the principle of reciprocity” is the key to these proofs. This principle is effective in getting ego-centric people to recognize moral laws and their moral obligations. However, it is not, I argue, the basic principle Hobbes uses to derive the laws of nature, from definitions. The principle of reason, which dictates that all similar cases be treated similarly, is. It is important not to diminish the centrality of reason for Hobbes because it is essential to understanding his reply to “the fool” and understanding why the state of nature cannot be a continuum.

‘to avoyd the present stroke of death:’ Despotical Dominion, Force, and Legitimacy in Hobbe's Leviathan

Philosophy ◽  
1999 ◽  
Vol 74 (2) ◽  
pp. 221-245 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charles D. Tarlton
Keyword(s):  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
Human Perception ◽  
The State ◽  
Natural Rights ◽  
The Other ◽  
State Of Nature

The logic of Leviathan is formally made to derive commonwealth and the rights of sovereignty (the obligations of subjects, read the other way around) from an elaborate process beginning in the physiology of human perception and passions, through language and reason, into the state of nature (the war of all against all) and, finally, under the direction of the laws of nature, to a collective and formal resignation of all their natural rights to create an absolute sovereign. This process of ‘instituting’ the sovereignty stamps the resulting sovereign with legitimacy. Early in the Second Part of Leviathan, however, Hobbes moves to attach all the rights and legitimacy of that instituted sovereignty onto what he calls ‘Despotical Dominion’, the power created when a conqueror exacts a promise from the conquered on pain of immediate death. The result is to translate all that Hobbes has said about sovereignty in general into a defence of the legitimacy of this crude force and violence. The whole of Leviathan's political argument is coloured, then, by this strategy and the best reading of it turns out to be the oldest one—that it is a defence of tyrannical power.

scholarly journals Rousseau i nowożytne spotkanie z Innym

2015 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 104-112
Author(s):  
Sylwester Zielka
Keyword(s):  
Early Modern ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
Thomas Hobbes ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
European Countries ◽  
Political Debate ◽  
State Of Nature ◽  
Primitive People ◽  
Noble Savage

The paper situates the thought of Jean Jacques Rousseau in the context of the 17th and 18th century social and political debate on the possibility of creating a better society, which intensified with the crisis of feudal system and early modern discovery of the Other. The paper also discusses consequences of this debate for shaping anthropology as a field of knowledge and understanding culture of the time. The idea of a “noble savage” according to which non-Europeans, i.e., the “primitive” people living in the state of nature as free and equal, without concerns and inconveniences of civilization, is contrasted with an opposite project of a “degenerate savage” of Thomas Hobbes, who used it as a justification for absolute monarchy in European countries and of European societies over non-Western ones.

Introduction

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
A.P. Martinich
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Laws Of Nature ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Nature

The central concepts of Thomas Hobbes’s political philosophy, especially as they appear in Leviathan, are explained in this book: the state of nature, the laws of nature; covenants; authorization and representation; sovereignty by institution, by acquisition, and by nature. The chapters are self-contained and should be intelligible to readers with only rudimentary knowledge of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Hence the title, ...

scholarly journals Socialism and/or Christianity: F.M. Dostoevsky’s Influence on S. Lagerlöf's Novel Antichrist’s Miracles

2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (3) ◽  
pp. 490-500
Author(s):  
Kseniia R. Andreichuk
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Main Character ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Political Views ◽  
Brothers Karamazov ◽  
Kingdom Of Christ ◽  
The Church

In the 1880s. F.M. Dostoevsky was perceived in Sweden as a revolutionary writer, therefore there was great attention to his political views, which influenced among others S. Lagerlf, who read Dostoevsky in Swedish, Danish and, possibly, in French. In the novel Antichrists Miracles (1897) S. Lagerlf talks about Italy, a Catholic country where the church has much more power than in Protestant lands. In this regard, Lagerlf actualizes F.M. Dostoevskys reflections on the connection between the state and the church, presented in Brothers Karamazov and other novels. The key question that interests both F.M. Dostoevsky and S. Lagerlf is whether people can build the kingdom of Christ on earth when Christ said: My kingdom is not of this world. F.M. Dostoevsky examines this problem in most detail in the unfinished article Socialism and Christianity , which S. Lagerlf could not read, but she was undoubtedly familiar with Dostoevskys thoughts on this matter put into the mouths of Zosima and Prince Myshkin. In S. Lagerlf's novel Antichrists Miracles , the main character becomes a socialist, though he dreamed of becoming a priest in childhood, like Alyosha Karamazov. A fake image of Christ with the words My kingdom is only on earth becomes a banner of socialism in Lagerlf's novel. This image works wonders but only related to earthly goods. At the end of the novel, Lagerlf comes to the conclusion (put into the mouth of the Pope) that this image should not be destroyed, but the earth should be reconciled with heaven. This conclusion is consistent with Dostoevskys ideas about the universal church realized on earth.

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