Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Hamilton, James J

Titel

The Civil State and Popular Sovereignty

Ist Teil von

• Hobbes's Creativity, 2023, p.155-200

Ort / Verlag

Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan

Erscheinungsjahr

2023

Link zum Volltext

Quelle

Alma/SFX Local Collection

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• 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.