Reason, Rhetoric and Science in Thomas Hobbes

Editore: FedOA - Federico II University Press

Series: Miscellaneous

Pages: 172

Language: Italian/English

Abstract: What can Thomas Hobbes still teach us about the world we live in? At a time marked by the erosion of the public sphere, the accelerating pace of social life, the digital reshaping of power, and changing understandings of the relationship between truth, science, and politics, Leviathan remains an indispensable classic. This volume brings together essays by scholars and students involved in the Political Philosophy course in the MA programme in Philosophy at the Department of Humanities of the Abstract: University of Naples Federico II, as well as in the teaching project that grew out of it. It emerges from a broader programme of study and research centred on the relationship between reason, rhetoric, and science in Hobbes’s thought, approached not simply as a matter of historical reconstruction, but as a critical resource for thinking through the tensions and contradictions of modernity. Ranging from political theology and anthropology to theories of sovereignty, the crisis of democracy, and contemporary forms of the infosphere and public communication, the essays collected here show just how much is still to be gained from reading Hobbes and from thinking with him. The result is a rich and wide-ranging collection in which political thought engages directly with the problems of the present, bringing out the enduring power of an author who continues to challenge, unsettle, and reshape the way we think about ourselves and about politics.