/lit/ - Literature

>>20462603
the book is huge and I'm currently on it. it starts out slow, and trudges on. Hobbes was a physicalist and believed everything was material, which is different from Aristotlean realism as Aristotle believed mental things were as real as physical objects, whereas Hobbes only accounted for physically perceivable things. ideas aren't physically perceivable so he saw things that occured in the mental sense to be just what we experience from the outer world and not "real" as being tangible things we could conceptualize as being objects in their own right. now does it make sense?

>>20462603
Otters are just so dang cute!

>>20462621
I want to pet him

>>20462619
Wait so I was right that he supposed the thing is it self and also what the senses percieve it as? Also, you've very much explained the shitflinging on the Aristotlean perspective, I didn't know Hobbes was a "physicalist" but this is my first time reading him.
Thanks for the reply by the way.

>>20462621
>>20462629
Why are you replying to yourself and shitting up my thread? Fuck off I'm trying to learn.

>>20462639
Consider that I am not aloppne in my appreciation of Otters. Besides, dont get your panties in a bunch, you are the one jezebelposting

>>20462651
I don't know what Jezebelposting is and if you want to bullshit in a thread go to /tv/ you bitch.

>>20462660
lurk more than you dumb fag, since you aren't able to use context clues (because you are low iq, which is obvious from your questions)

>>20462629
me too
>>20462639
accept the free bump retard
>>20462660
lurk moar
>>20462603
>I thought this fucking book was going to be about the ethics of totalitarian government and the inherent anamilistic nature of man, I'm so fucking confused.
well, that's the whole point. Hobbes is a systematic philosopher, and everything he wrote logically follows. ideas aren't real. ethics aren't real. "God" isn't real, insofar as there was a corporeal first cause that set everything in motion and was strong to preserve order for a while. then everything broke down.

in the absence of any "real" transcendental things to shoot for, only peace for its own sake is worthwhile. it doesn't matter what flavor that takes peace, any order will do as long as it's total and it lasts. that's the genius of Hobbes, the way he makes nominalism into an ethically viable position when we have nothing else to fall back on.

Hobbes is slightly unsystematic as a metaphysical/epistemological thinker, and there are actually arguments (usually coming from the Straussians) that he is deliberately unsystematic because he really doesn't give that much of a fuck about the nature of reality or cognition, because what he is really interested in doing is giving a plausible ENOUGH account of human knowledge and humanity's place in the world that it dethrones the traditional, theological and scholastic conceptions of reality. It simply doesn't have to destroy or refute the Aristotelian world conception of the Church, it only had to call it into QUESTION, i.e. put the burden of proof back on it in people's minds.

Similarly he doesn't have to convince anyone decisively of the correctness of his materialist alternative, he only has to show that there are such alternatives, that presumably one COULD clean up a materialist world-picture enough that it would be plausible, etc. So what he is really trying to do is to say: we can't take these theological and scholastic ideas for granted just because all the smartypants in the universities still defend them, or the theologians. We have to start over from scratch, and build up a reasonable picture of the world (and thus our role and potential in the world) using our own reason.

The Straussian argument is that this is as far as Hobbes cared to take it, because his real interest was in thinking about human affairs un-metaphysically, unfettered by metaphysics and moral and theologian arguments. He is more of a "realist" and even common sense thinker than a pure metaphysician.

Even if you don't agree with this, I think it's an interesting extreme to consider. I think Hobbes definitely was interested in metaphysics for its own sake, his engagement with Descartes and Mersenne's circle and his genuine admiration of the new innovations in geometry and mechanics, etc. But I do think there is some truth in saying that he shouldn't be read the same way as, let's say, Kant is read. Meaning, I don't think he was expecting his larger worldview and arguments about the state to collapse if someone has a minor quibble with the axiomatic structure of his materialist metaphysics.

It's different from Aristotle because Aristotle is a natural kinds realist, and thinks the world has a hierarchical structure with many qualitatively different kinds of things in it (three levels of soul, natural kinds or universals or forms, etc.). Hobbes is saying, look, we can parsimoniously reduce the entire world to the mechanics of matter, like some of the pre-Socratics did. Even we ourselves are just complex agglomerations of matter, the matter entering our brain causes thoughts in purely material ways (what Aristotle called efficient causation), even if we don't currently understand them. Aristotle and the scholastics have all kinds of faculties and treat mind as a distinct thing with its own norms and metaphysical substance (read Hobbes' Objections to Descartes)

>>20462674
Great response. Let me pick your brain a little bit. Why do you think Hobbes was unwilling to characterize the "science" of humans under the same branch as the science of everything else in Leviathan?

Op here again, could someone tell me if my grasp on Hobbes' idea of how perception works is close to what he meant or if I should just give up and try a secondary source for the book.

>>20462850
yeah you've got it

>>20462874
Oh thank God

>>20462928
just kidding you're way off

>>20462639
doesn't look like you want to learn. stick to fiction kiddo.

>>20462637
you're welcome

>>20462985
Fuck
>>20462998
Both people you were responding to were me (op)

>>20462985
How am I wrong though? Explain it to me so I can understand.

>>20463126
What your doing wrong is thinking I am being sincere. I don't know who Hobbes is.

>>20463151
Kek, are you the same anon who said I was right or did you just jump on the oppurtunity?

>>20463192
I'm the guy who said I like otters, taking my revenge for your rude behavior.

>>20463216
You're still a bitch

>>20463221
you are still a naive newfag who is going to fall for every trick in the book.

>>20463192
no that was me