1. To be moral is to be moved to act by reason; and to be moved to act by reason is to be moved by the good. This venerable platitude raises many questions. Some are about the nature of goodness it...

The paper examines the place of power in the action theories of Francisco Suarez and Thomas Hobbes. Power is the capacity to produce or determine outcomes. Two cases of power are examined. The first is freedom or the power of agents to determine for themselves what they do. The second is motivation, which involves a power to which agents are subject, and by which they are moved to pursue a goal. Suarez, in the Metaphysical Disputations, uses Aristotelian causation to model (...) these two forms of power. Freedom is efficient causation, but in a special form that I explain as involving something that ordinary causation does not – the contingent determination of outcomes. Motivating power is final causation, which Suarez characterizes as the power of a goal or end to move us to attain it through its goodness or desirability. Suarez regards these two forms of power as consistent – we can be moved by the goodness of a goal freely to determine for ourselves that we act in order to attain it. Hobbes denied the existence of all forms of power beyond ordinary causation, the power of one motion in matter to determine another. So he denied the very existence both of freedom and of any form of motivating power beyond the ordinary causal power of desires as materially based psychological states to produce actions. The goodness itself of a goal never moves us, whether to desire the goal in the first place or to act in order to attain it. The paper examines Hobbes’s arguments and their consequence – establishing the foundations for Hume’s scepticism about practical reason. (shrink)

This paper deals with Hobbes's theory of optical images, developed in his optical magnum opus, ‘A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques’, and published in abridged version in De homine. The paper suggests that Hobbes's theory of vision and images serves him to ground his philosophy of man on his philosophy of body. Furthermore, since this part of Hobbes's work on optics is the most thoroughly geometrical, it reveals a good deal about the role of mathematics in Hobbes's philosophy. (...) The paper points to some difficulties in the thesis of Shapin and Schaffer, who presented geometry as a ‘paradigm’ for Hobbes's natural philosophy. It will be argued here that Hobbes's application of geometry to optics was dictated by his metaphysical and epistemological principles, not by a blind belief in the power of geometry. Geometry supported causal explanation, and assisted reason in making sense of appearances by helping the philosopher understand the relationships between the world outside us and the images it produces in us. Finally the paper broadly suggests how Hobbes's theory of images may have triggered, by negative example, the flourishing of geometrical optics in Restoration England. (shrink)

Hobbes’s interpreters have struggled to find a plausible semantics for evaluative language in his writings. I argue that this search is misguided. Hobbes offers neither an account of the reference of evaluative terms nor a theory of the truth-conditions for evaluative statements. Rather, he sees evaluative language simply as having the non-representational function of prescribing actions and practical attitudes, its superficially representational appearance notwithstanding. I marshal the evidence for this prescriptivist reading of Hobbes on evaluative language and show how it (...) sidesteps various textual and philosophical problems that bedevil the traditional interpretations. (shrink)

Prior to 1651, Hobbes was agnostic about the existence of God. Hobbes argued that God’s existence could neither be demonstrated nor proved, so that those who reason about God’s existence will systematically vacillate, sometimes thinking God exists, sometimes not, which for Hobbes is to say they will doubt God’s existence. Because this vacillation or doubt is inherent to the subject, reasoners like himself will judge that settling on one belief rather than another is epistemically unjustified. Hobbes’s agnosticism becomes apparent once (...) we attend to his distinctions between the propositional attitudes one might adopt towards theological claims, including supposing, thinking, having faith and knowing. (shrink)

This paper investigates Locke’s views about materialism, by looking at the discussion in Essay IV.x. There Locke---after giving a cosmological argument for the existence of God---argues that God could not be material, and that matter alone could never produce thought. In discussing the chapter, I pay particular attention to some comparisons between Locke’s position and those of two other seventeenth-century philosophers, René Descartes and Ralph Cudworth. -/- Making use of those comparisons, I argue for two main claims. The first is (...) that the important argument of Essay IV.x.10 is fundamentally an argument about the causation of perfections. Indeed, Locke gives multiple such arguments in the chapter. My second main claim is that my proposed reading of IV.x is not merely consistent with what Locke says elsewhere about superaddition, but also provides reasons to favor a particular understanding of what superaddition is. (shrink)