Get 20M+ Full-Text Papers For Less Than $1.50/day. Start a 14-Day Trial for You or Your Team.

Learn More →

Thomas Hobbes: Magnanimity, Felicity, and Justice

Thomas Hobbes: Magnanimity, Felicity, and Justice Thomas Hobbes’s concept of magnanimity, a descendant of Aristotle’s “greatness of soul,” plays a key role in Hobbes’s theory with respect to felicity and the virtue of justice. In his Critique du ‘De Mundo ’, Hobbes implies that only genuinely magnanimous people can achieve the greatest felicity in their lives. A life of felicity is a life of pleasure, where the only pleasure that counts is the well grounded glory experienced by those who are magnanimous. Hobbes suggests that felicity involves the successful pursuit of desires, a pursuit at which the magnanimous are particularly adept. Additionally, Hobbes implies that those who possess the virtue of justice must also possess magnanimity; it is the just person’s “Nobleness or Gallantnesse of courage, (rarely found).” Leo Strauss and Dorothea Krook suggest that this cannot be Hobbes’s “final word” on justice, because, they say, Hobbes considers magnanimity a type of pride, which he derogates and cannot consistently associate with virtue. I argue that magnanimity, associated with well-grounded glory, is not a type of pride; only vain glory is. http://www.deepdyve.com/assets/images/DeepDyve-Logo-lg.png Hobbes Studies Brill

Thomas Hobbes: Magnanimity, Felicity, and Justice

Hobbes Studies , Volume 26 (2): 130 – Jan 1, 2013

Loading next page...
 
/lp/brill/thomas-hobbes-magnanimity-felicity-and-justice-gwL0OI20p9

References (1)

Publisher
Brill
Copyright
© 2013 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands
Subject
Articles
ISSN
0921-5891
eISSN
1875-0257
DOI
10.1163/18750257-02602003
Publisher site
See Article on Publisher Site

Abstract

Thomas Hobbes’s concept of magnanimity, a descendant of Aristotle’s “greatness of soul,” plays a key role in Hobbes’s theory with respect to felicity and the virtue of justice. In his Critique du ‘De Mundo ’, Hobbes implies that only genuinely magnanimous people can achieve the greatest felicity in their lives. A life of felicity is a life of pleasure, where the only pleasure that counts is the well grounded glory experienced by those who are magnanimous. Hobbes suggests that felicity involves the successful pursuit of desires, a pursuit at which the magnanimous are particularly adept. Additionally, Hobbes implies that those who possess the virtue of justice must also possess magnanimity; it is the just person’s “Nobleness or Gallantnesse of courage, (rarely found).” Leo Strauss and Dorothea Krook suggest that this cannot be Hobbes’s “final word” on justice, because, they say, Hobbes considers magnanimity a type of pride, which he derogates and cannot consistently associate with virtue. I argue that magnanimity, associated with well-grounded glory, is not a type of pride; only vain glory is.

Journal

Hobbes StudiesBrill

Published: Jan 1, 2013

Keywords: Magnanimity; Justice; Happiness; Glory

There are no references for this article.