Hobbes's Ultranominalist Critique of Natural Right

It is well known that Thomas Hobbes was a nominalist, but the radicalism of his position, this article argues, is frequently under-estimated. Hobbes's remarks on the nature of names, will, deliberation, and truth have an internal logic that, the author contends, is designed to express the necessary subjectivity of the categories of ordinary language. His criticism of those who would make Aristotelian natural light into the regulative concept of political life is grounded in this theory of language. Ultranominalism explains why natural right exacerbates political discord by deflecting attention from the contingent idiosyncracies of emotion and culture that structure the very language in which theorists formulate their moral claims. Despite inconsistencies in his views and weaknesses in his assumptions, the author concludes, Hobbes succeeds in focusing critical attention on the linguistic assumptions that support allegedly objective moral standards

Criticism · Deliberation · Epistemology · Linguistic turn · Natural (archaeology · Nominalism · Political philosophy · Political radicalism · Political science · Politics · Sociology · Subjectivity · Law · Marxism and Critical Theory · Philosophy · Political Theology and Sovereignty · Seventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought

• Hobbes's Paradoxical Toleration

  Open Access•Nicola Higgins, Nicholas Higgins•Politics and Religion•2016

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