GOLEM I LEWIATAN TULEJSKI, Tomasz; ZAWADZKI, Arnold
Politeja,
12/2019, Volume:
16, Issue:
59
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
In the article, the Authors point out that Hobbes’s political philosophy (and in fact theology) in the heterodox layer is inspired not only by Judeo-Christianity, but also by rabbinic Judaism. ...According to them, only adopting such a Judaic and in a sense syncretistic perspective enabled Hobbes to come to such radical conclusions, hostile towards the Catholic and Calvinist conceptions of the state and the Church. In their argument they focused on three elements that are most important for Hobbesian concept of sovereignty: the covenant between Jahwe and the Chosen People, the concept of the Kingdom of God, salvation and the afterlife, and the concept of a messiah.
Thomas Hobbes tells us that he wrote Leviathan to “absolve the divine laws” of the charge that they justify rebellion. This article interprets the argumentative strategy of the second half of ...Leviathan in light of this intention. Over the course of his three major political works, Hobbes develops a convergent argument to absolve God’s laws. This strategy of judicial rhetoric relies on using multiple independent claims in the hope that one’s audience finds at least one of them persuasive. This was a risky strategy for Hobbes that angered his critics. The strategy also reveals something about what sort of philosopher Hobbes was and how we ought to approach his work.
This essay argues for a new understanding of Hobbes's idiosyncratic depiction of eschatology in Leviathan, and for its relationship to his depiction of sovereignty. In his radical portrayal of ...salvation, the highest good is maintenance of physical existence free of physical harm. Communion with God is denied, on the basis of fellowship between God and humankind purportedly being inimical to divine sovereignty. Hobbes effectively reduces the affective experience of God to fear and the desire for self-preservation. This article contends that the political significance of Hobbes's eschatological innovations is not only a matter of devaluing salvation so as to lessen its political threat. It is also a matter of locating the experience of earthly sovereignty, constituted by remoteness and power, in the eschaton as well as in this world. This transformation of the affectivity of eschatological hope, I argue, can be seen to shore up earthly sovereignty.
This article traces Hobbes's account of 'exemplarity' from his early writings to Leviathan. It argues that, by tracking Hobbes's changing views on exemplarity, we get a better grasp on how he ...construed the effective conditions of an enduring peace in 1651. While these conditions are compatible with the formal structure of sovereignty, they remain distinct from it. I start by inserting Hobbes's early engagement with historiography in the context of the 'crisis of exemplarity' of the late Renaissance. Whereas prior engagement with antiquity had relied on a notion of exemplarity as historical particulars embodying general norms to be imitated in a contemporary setting, a dissatisfaction with this model, characteristic of a revived interest in Tacitus, appears in the sixteenth century. Initially adhering to this 'Tacitean' scheme of political theory, Hobbes ended up abandoning exemplarity as the foundational model of politics in Elements of Law and De cive. However, Leviathan reintroduced the scheme of exemplarity as a strategy of effective government. This strategy is based on a retrieval of the sovereign's appearance as a moral exemplum to be imitated by the subjects. Lastly, I suggest that this change stems from the altered conditions of government at the end of the 1640s.
How did Thomas Hobbes describe the circumstances that, in his view, allowed him to write Leviathan? And come to express there, without apparent constraint (as many horrified contemporaries attested), ...his views on politics and religion? The answers to these questions lie in Hobbes's understanding of the opportunity history afforded him to compose his masterpiece. This essay considers Hobbes as a case study in the complex dynamics of early modern authorial assertions and defenses. While Hobbes is an extreme example-few authors have had to withstand the assault Hobbes endured-his defense of Leviathan, which began in Leviathan itself and continued for decades after its publication, is representative of how a number of authors in this period justified their work by carefully framing the circumstances of its composition.
•New framework for interpreting triple oxygen isotope variability in speleothems.•New assessment of triple oxygen isotope fractionation between water and carbonate.•Data in Δ′17O vs. δ′18O space ...provide a novel assessment of within-cave kinetics.•Within-cave kinetics did not drive δ18O variability in western USA speleothems.•Reconstructed parent waters define a climate-driven slope of 0.5249 ± 0.0004.
Speleothem oxygen isotope (δ18O) records provide key insight into the rate and timing of terrestrial paleoclimate changes during the late Quaternary. However, it can be difficult to deconvolve the δ18O signal into individual components, which include processes related to moisture source, moisture transport, temperature, precipitation amount, infiltration, and the cave environment. We developed a framework that uses triple oxygen isotope distributions in speleothems to refine interpretations of δ18O speleothem records. This framework identifies the influence of dominant processes on δ18O values through time by their characteristic (although not necessarily unique) trends in Δ′17O vs. δ′18O space, where Δ′17O = δ′17O – 0.528δ′18O and δ′xO = ln(δxO + 1). Following Guo and Zhou (2019a), we expect that ‘cave kinetic’ processes (e.g., fast degassing at the drip site, prior calcite precipitation) will drive positive trends between δ′18O and Δ′17O. In contrast, we can identify hydrologic processes from near-horizontal trends that reflect Rayleigh-type meteoric water processes and negative trends driven by changes in evaporation processes at the moisture source region or at the cave site, mineralization temperature, and seasonality in precipitation/infiltration amount. We applied this framework to four western USA speleothems from Cave of the Bells (Arizona), Leviathan Cave (Nevada), and Lehman Caves (Nevada). The Cave of the Bells and Leviathan data have near-horizontal to negative trends indicating δ18O variability was driven largely by changes in Rayleigh distillation of atmospheric moisture and moisture source conditions, supporting prior interpretations. We analyzed two Lehman Caves records because they were likely influenced by non-equilibrium processes and the data show weak to moderate negative trends. For sample LMC-12b, chosen for its extreme 7.5‰ δ18O range, the trend is statistically distinct from the near-horizontal Rayleigh-process trend and most consistent with changes in local evaporation intensity and infiltration seasonality as primary drivers. None of these records displays a positive covariation slope between δ′18O and Δ′17O, suggesting limited variability in cave kinetic processes through time or unknown limitations to the kinetic model of Guo and Zhou (2019a). Additionally, reconstructed formation waters for all sites fall near the Δ′17O vs. δ′18O Local Meteoric Water Line, a correlation we suggest as a novel test of the absolute magnitude of isotopic offset due to cave kinetic processes. More broadly, our framework adds context to the only other study of carbonate speleothem triple oxygen isotope composition (Sha et al., 2020). We find that positive to negative Δ′17O vs. δ′18O trends likely exist in speleothem data that may reasonably be expected from regional climate processes and that, combined with other proxy data, triple oxygen isotope data will be useful in constraining interpretations of δ18Ospeleothem records.
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