The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast Episode 3: Hobbes's Leviathan: The Social Contract
25 snips
Jun 7, 2009 AI Snips
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Episode notes
Teaching Hobbes To Reluctant Students
- Mark recounts teaching Hobbes to uninterested college students who found the text torturous and unreadable.
- That experience colored his reaction and shaped the episode's critical tone.
Finding Beauty In Hobbes's Prose
- Seth praises several pithy Hobbes passages and defends the ornate older prose as possessing poetic and rhetorical value.
- He finds beauty in Hobbes's long sentences despite their difficulty for modern readers.
Nature-Based Foundation For Politics
- Hobbes builds political theory from a grim view of human nature and a mechanistic description of self-preservation.
- From that state of nature he deduces the need for a sovereign to secure peace and morality.