A blind spot? the birth of an ideology clearing away the rubbish print culture nationalising religion the culture of science anatomising human nature the science of politics secularising modernising happiness from good sense to sensibility nature did the mind have a sex? education - a panacea the vulgar the pursuit of wealth reform progress the revolutionary era - "modern philosophy" lasting light?

Enlightenment: Britain and the Creation of the Modern World

In "Probability and Evidence," one of Britain's foremost twentieth-century philosophers addresses central questions in the theory of knowledge and the philosophy of science. This book contains A.J. Ayer's John Dewey Lectures delivered at Columbia University, together with two additional essays, "Has Harrod Answered Hume?" and "The Problem of Conditionals."

Probability and Evidence

h AM MOST GRATEFUL to Professors Schochet and Wiener not just for their generosity in commenting on my work, but also for their accuracy in reporting my arguments and their perceptiveness as critics. It seems possible to respond to their remarks in one of two ways. One would be to pursue the implications of Wiener's article and try to provide some more historical information about the context of Hobbes's political thought. This strikes me as an attractive alternative, especially since I agree with his suggestion that I ought to devote more attention to analysing the nature of the social pressures which helped to prompt Hobbes and his sympathisers to espouse their peculiar brand of absolutism. (He does not mention, however, that this theme has already been brilliantly explored by K. V. Thomas, 1965.) The other alternative is to say something more about my general approach to the study of political theory, of which my work on Hobbes (as Schochet and Wiener both acknowledge) has mainly been intended to serve as an example. This strikes me as even more attractive, and it is this line of argument which I shall pursue.

III. Some Problems in the Analysis of Political Thought and Action

The modern reputation of Hobbes's Leviathan as a work ‘incredibly overtopping all its successors in political theory’ has concentrated so much attention on Hobbes's own text that it has tended at the same time to divert attention away from any attempt to study the relations between his thought and its age, or to trace his affinities with the other political writers of his time. It has by now become an axiom of the historiography that Hobbes's ‘extraordinary boldness’ set him completely ‘outside the main stream of English political thought’ in his time. The theme of the one study devoted to the reception of Hobbes's political doctrines has been that Hobbes stood out alone ‘against all the powerful and still developing constitutionalist tradition’, but that the tradition (‘fortunately’) proved too strong for him. Hobbes was ‘the first to attack its fundamental assumptions’, but no one followed his lead. Although he ‘tried to sweep away the whole structure of traditional sanctions’, he succeeded only in provoking ‘the widespread re-assertion of accepted principles’, a re-assertion, in fact, of ‘the main English political tradition’. And the more Leviathan has become accepted as ‘the greatest, perhaps the sole masterpiece’ of English political theory, the less has Hobbes seemed to bear any meaningful relation to the ephemeral political quarrels of his contemporaries. The doctrine of Leviathan has come to be regarded as ‘an isolated phenomenon in English thought, without ancestry or posterity’. Hobbes's system, it is assumed, was related to its age only by the ‘intense opposition’ which its ‘boldness and originality’ were to provoke.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/S0018246X66000014

III. The Ideological Context of Hobbes's Political Thought

This paper is concerned with the conditions requisite to an understanding of "classic" works in sociological theory, using Durkheim's Elementary Forms of the Religious Life as the example. Included are (1) a discussion of "presentist" and "historicist" approaches to the history of sociological thought; (2) a criticism of presentist "statements of contribution" in the secondary literature on the Elementary Forms; (3) an assessment of Merton's distinction between the "history" and the "systematics" of sociological theory; (4) a reconsideration of "contextual" approaches to classical social theory; (5) the proposal of a new approach to the history of sociological theory, illustrated by a very tentative reinterpretation of Durkheim's theory of sacrifice; and (6) a concluding section on the value for sociology itself of an authentic history of sociological thought.

Dipak Nandy

Papers

The divine politics of thomas hobbes

The hunting of leviathan