Reading Hobbes Backwards

Reviews / Votes

'Reading Hobbes Backwards is a captivating and pathbreaking account of Hobbes's view of peace, why it was urgent, how difficult it was to achieve, and that it could never be realised without addressing the problem of religious fanaticism. Patricia Springborg has written another brilliant book that will fascinate intellectual historians everywhere.'Richard WhatmoreProfessor of Modern History, St. Andrews University, UK, Editor of Global Intellectual History Patricia Springborg is one of the leading scholars of Hobbes' philosophy and in this ground-breaking work she offers a 'backwards reading' of his Leviathan, showing the extent to which it was dependent on the work of his predecessors, most notably, those who translated Aristotle into Arabic and then from Arabic into Latin, and the Oxford 'Calculators' of the fourteenth century. Now that philosophers in the West are finally waking up to the rich plurality of philosophical traditions on which their 'canonical' figures drew, this provides an extraordinarily detailed case study of the hitherto unrecognized influences on Hobbes.'Michael BeaneyRegius Chair of Logic, Aberdeen University, UK, Professor of the History of Analytic Philosophy, Humboldt University, Berlin, Germany. 'Patricia Springborg's latest book underlines the coherence of her interpretation of Hobbes's works. Hobbes lived in troubled times and could not speak his mind explicitly. He had recourse to various kinds of dissimulation like many of his European contemporaries. After her ground-breaking edition of Hobbes's Historia Ecclesiastica, Patricia Springborg here illustrates Hobbes's acute understanding of political surrogacy in his attempt to resolve the problem of sectarianism.'Antony McKennaEmeritus Professor University of Saint-Etienne, France, Director of Champion, Paris, series on Free Thought and Clandestine Literature