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“... Williams, neither to be found in Gross, and Gross has his pets – Sherrington, for instance, and Thomas Szasz, unknown to Auden. The earlier book has a useful thematic index, Gross’s has not. Gross is more specific about his sources. Both classify their material under such headings as Humanity, Religion, Nature, Life, down to Young and Old, Sickness and ...”

“... books hug the East Coast strip bounded by Princeton in the south (where she earned her PhD under Thomas Nagel) and Boston in the north. She has what Hobbes called libido sciendi. She’s absorbed by the relation between emotion and intellect, and in particular by genius. The off-chart mathematician Noam Himmel opens her ...”

“... which favoured Jewish readmission. MPs are unlikely to have been reassured by the activities of Thomas Tany, ‘Theaureau John’. Informed by nocturnal revelations that God had commissioned him to gather the dispersed Jews and lead them to the Holy Land, Tany proceeded to establish assembly camps at Greenwich and Lambeth, ‘tents for every tribe, and the ...”

“... lay close at hand, all but universally ignored. The world’s two leading authorities on Thomas Hobbes, the foremost modern theorist of sovereignty, are at different ends of the political spectrum: Noel Malcolm of All Souls, editor of Leviathan for Oxford, on the right; Richard Tuck of Harvard, author of the finest contextualisation of ...”

“... claim true. But it is a safe inference that his views on the question diverge from those of Thomas Jefferson. What, if anything, does make the claim simply true must be the rationally-interpreted place of human beings within the order (or disorder) of nature. If all human beings do simply have rights, that is to say, these rights must be natural ...”

“... alchemical experiments need imply that the philosopher’s stone really exists, or admiration for Hobbes (Boyle’s chief critic) any reluctance to use a Vacu-Vin. Geneva focuses on Lilly’s prognostications of Charles I’s death, which reached a climax in 1645 with his Starry Messenger, in which he brought together not only arguments from the King’s ...”

“... a self-inflicted lèse-majesté. In another age, the Tower of London would be dusting down Thomas More’s old cell for him. But it would be unfair to dismiss Batten as a know-nothing stirrer, though often his behaviour does seem to fit that description: calling Islam‘a death cult’, claiming that the EU was inspired by Hitler’s plans for Europe ...”

“... on Sunday, 23 February) to ‘lay down from the centre exactly how reading should be taught’. Hobbes would have known what to call this: it is ‘a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, which ceaseth only in death’. Is that a sufficient explanation? It certainly contains some truth, and the desire to intervene in teaching methods shows an ...”

“... Reformation; the first major ‘constellation’ contains More, the Italian city designers, and Thomas Müntzer. Strange companion-stars, one might well think, but, for the Manuels, they were all intent on specifying the nature of an ideal Christian society. Even if that be granted – and the dominant ideals of the Renaissance city-planners were surely ...”

“... brilliance that blossomed under their auspices (Merton’s favourite is the case of Thomas Kuhn, for whom the Harvard Society of Fellows and the Stanford Center provided the opportunity and the stimulation to write The Structure of Scientific Revolutions). But whether serendipity (or any other variety of successful research) flourishes better ...”

“... as between plain and figurative English was the same for Spenser and Greville and Sidney, for Hobbes and Cudworth, for Locke and Berkeley, as for J.L. Austin and Iris Murdoch and himself. Similarly he assumes that Americans like Santayana and John Crowe Ransom and Kenneth Burke, when they speak of language, have in their sights and in their ears the same ...”

“... rhetoric of patriots than those of the early 18th-century British journalists John Trenchard and Thomas Gordon or the Swiss jurist Emer de Vattel. After 1776, in any case, Locke’s influence as a political philosopher declined sharply. By the 1780s Americans of the founding generation were much more likely to invoke the ideas of Montesquieu or William ...”

“... truth that ‘all men are created equal,’ written into the Declaration of Independence by Thomas Jefferson. He and his co-signatories managed, notoriously, to square this truth with slave-ownership. The self-evidence born of vagueness tends to dissolve when the pitting of interests demands political resolution. Jefferson seems to have agonised, up to ...”

“... Students were once introduced to it by way of its giants – the likes of Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Marx. Rather than a living discussion among contemporaries, between great thinkers and lesser fry, political thought was reckoned to be a more elevated – if stilted – affair, of giant responding unto giant, sometimes across ...”

“... questions of quality and value. This, once more, is a thoroughly traditional moral project, which Thomas Aquinas would have had no trouble in recognising. Moralism and idealism must be refuted, and the question of what we ought to do must somehow be anchored in the way it is with us. But the spectre of reductionism is not simple to exorcise, and it is easier ...”