Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hamilton, James J

Titel

Moral Relativity and the Sovereign

Ist Teil von

• Hobbes's Creativity, 2023, p.101-125

Ort / Verlag

Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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.