Hobbes Questions:
1. What is the source of our ideas?
2. How are memory and imagination related?
3. How is inertia connected to memory?
4. What distinguishes human understanding from
that of other animals?
5. How do we try to anticipate the future?
6. How strong is the reasoning we use in doing
this?
7. What makes it impossible to conceive or
comprehend God?
8. What is a ‘vital’ motion, for Hobbes?
9. What is the difference between appetite and
desire?
10. Why is there no ‘perpetual tranquility of mind’
while we live on the earth?
11. What makes it impossible to conceive what it
would be like to be in heaven?
12. What is the greatest human power?
13. Why do we all constantly seek power?
14. How do people use custom and reason in their
reasoning about right and wrong?
15. What is the result of this practice?
16. What are the two sources Hobbes identifies for
religious beliefs?
17. Which of these is more important for the
monotheistic religions?
18. What do we mean when we deny that God is
corporeal?
19. How do (almost) all men arrive at their opinions
regarding causes and effects?
20. What do those who propose or defend religions
aim to accomplish?
21. How does Hobbes describe the ‘state of
nature’?
22. What is a law of nature?
23. What is the first law of nature? What is the
second (which follows from it)?
24. What is the right of nature?
25. How can rights be ‘laid aside’?
26. Who are the parties to the ‘social contract’?
27. What is the ‘sovereign’?
28. What right cannot be laid aside?
29. What rights are laid aside in the social
contract?
30. Why can’t the sovereign do an injustice to a
subject?
31. What is ‘iniquity’?
32. Why is acceptance of our equality essential to
the social contract?
33. What is the ninth law of nature?
34. Why can’t someone be an arbitrator in their
own cause?
35. What purpose does the ‘golden rule’ serve
here?
36. What is the overarching goal that all these laws
are to serve?
37. What bad impulses arise from our ‘natural
passions’?
38. Why do we need a ‘visible power’ to enforce
these laws of nature?
39. Why can’t our own inclinations and preference
for peace be enough ensure peace?
40. Why doesn’t the example of social insects show
that we don’t need an external power to ensure
peace?
41. How does Hobbes feel about social discord and
disagreements on policy?
42. What is a commonwealth, on Hobbes’ account?
43. What do we all give up to the state (sovereign)
in forming a commonwealth?
44. What is the difference between a
commonwealth by institution and a
commonwealth by acquisition?
45. Why can’t the citizens of a commonwealth (by
institution) withdraw their consent & choose
another sovereign?
46. Why is appeal to God not a way out of this
problem?
47. Who is the covenant (establishing a
commonwealth by institution) with and among?
48. Why can’t the sovereign violate that covenant?
49. What is the actual effect of declaring the
sovereign in violation and the covenant broken?
50. How may the commonwealth deal with a lone
(or a few) dissenters?
51. How far do the sovereign’s powers of
censorship extend?
52. What are the rules of ‘propriety’?
53. Why must all the essential powers of the
sovereign be kept unified?
54. Why does Hobbes dismiss worries about a
sovereign being corrupt or having ‘irregular
passions’?
55. What is Liberty (properly speaking)?
56. Why is there (really) no such thing as freedom
of the will?
57. Why does Hobbes hold our actions ‘proceed
from necessity’?
58. How does Hobbes differ with those who frame
their political demands as demands for ‘liberty’?
59. Why does Hobbes think so many confuse
democracy with some special kind of ‘liberty’?
60. What rights does a subject retain, when a
sovereign is instituted?
61. What is the general rule for this distinction
between where we may refuse to obey the
sovereign and where not?
62. Why does Hobbes seem to think the act of
pardoning rebels can be a good idea for the
sovereign?
63. What do other liberties (beyond those rights
that cannot be transferred) depend on?