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Record W2801415455 · doi:10.22215/etd/2013-09988

Human Nature in Hobbes and Thucydides

2013· dissertation· en· W2801415455 on OpenAlexaff
Jonathan Wensveen

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typedissertation
Languageen
FieldArts and Humanities
TopicSeventeenth-Century Political and Philosophical Thought
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
Fundersnot available
KeywordsVirtuePlague (disease)PoliticsPhilosophyEpistemologyLEVIATHAN (cipher)Economic JusticeSpanish Civil WarState of natureHistoryLawPolitical scienceAncient history

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

As a close reader, translator, and self--professed admirer of Thucydides, Thomas Hobbes was heavily influenced by the former's account of human nature, provided in his History of the Peloponnesian War.In fact, many scholars (in both political theory and international relations) have been keen to point out just this.Passages, they argue, such as the Plague at Athens and the Civil War at Corcyra, both of which reveal human nature at its darkest, undoubtedly shaped Hobbes's own understanding and conception of man, the most comprehensive account of which appears in the first part of his most famous and mature work, Leviathan.What many of these scholars fail to acknowledge, however, is that for all of their similarities Thucydides' account of human nature is also somewhat different from that of Hobbes.Indeed, although Thucydides often describes man at his worst, his History also provides moving examples of man at his best.In contrast to passages such as the Plague at Athens and the Civil War at Corcyra, passages such as the Mytilenean Debate and Pericles' Funeral Oration highlight the human concern and capacity for virtue and justice, and indicate a recognition on the part of Thucydides (as opposed to Hobbes) that, despite what the primordial imposes on human beings they nevertheless and at the same time yearn for something higher.The purpose of this thesis, then, is to account for this fundamental, yet often overlooked difference.In it, I essentially argue that the difference between Thucydides and Hobbes on the question of human nature can be explained best by looking to Aristotle and Hobbes's attack on him.More specifically, I argue that Hobbes's rejection of Aristotle's political science, moral and political psychology, and account of human nature underlying it, is also and at the same time what necessarily handcuffs him from acknowledging as natural certain aspects of the human condition that Thucydides, like Aristotle, does.Finally, I argue that for this reason, Hobbes's attack on Aristotle also qualifies, in some ways, as an attack on that thinker he admired most: Thucydides.Table of Contents Introduction....

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.002
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.007
Threshold uncertainty score0.030

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.002
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0020.001
Science and technology studies0.0070.020
Scholarly communication0.0050.003
Open science0.0000.002
Research integrity0.0020.003
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0030.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.024
GPT teacher head0.274
Teacher spread0.251 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreEmpirical

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2013
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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