Dans "Les passions de l’âme", Descartes fait de l’admiration « la première de toutes les passions ». L’admiration n’est plus, comme dans la tradition antique du Thaumazein, la passion distinctive du philosophe, elle devient le premier moment de la vie affective de l’homme dans son rapport aux choses extérieures. Passion de la première rencontre, l’admiration ne serait finalement que la passion de l’enfance – condamnée à se dissoudre dans la connaissance à laquelle elle donne lieu. Une telle disparition est-elle pour autant inéluctable ? Qu’est-ce qui doit être supposé de la nature de l’admiration pour qu’il soit acceptable de la faire durer dans le temps ? L’admiration est-elle une passion dynamique qui incite à penser ou au contraire un affect statique qui empêche l’exercice de la raison ? L’analyse cherche à mettre au jour la manière dont l’admiration est devenue un problème central de l’anthropologie classique. La promotion cartésienne de l’admiration, loin d’être un geste singulier, se trouve ainsi réinscrite dans son contexte théorique. À partir de textes philosophiques, médicaux, moraux et esthétiques du XVIIe siècle, il s’agit de se demander si,loin d’être seulement subie, comme le corrélat affectif d’une ignorance inaugurale,l’admiration peut également faire l’objet d’une maîtrise technique susceptible de la produire et de la reproduire indéfiniment à des fins stratégiques ou récréatives. Dès lors qu’elle est soustraite à la stricte exigence épistémique, l’admiration peut en effet se présenter comme la finalité spécifique de l’existence mondaine aussi bien que des productions artistiques du grand siècle, que l’on peut alors considérer comme le siècle de l’admiration. / In The Passions of the Soul, Descartes presents wonder as «the first of all passions». Wonderis no longer, as it used to be in the antic tradition of thaumazein, the philosopher’s distinctive passion, but the first moment in a man’s emotional life, regarding his relationship to external items. As the passion of the first encounter, wonder appears reducible to the childhood’s passion - condemned to dissolve itself in the knowledge it enables. Is such a disappearence unavoidable ? How must one think the nature of wonder to make admissible its duration intime ? Is wonder a dynamic passion spuring one to start thinking or on the contrary, a static effect preventing the exercice of reason ?The analysis tries to uncover the way wonder became a central problem in classic anthropology. Cartesian’s promotion of wonder, far from being a singular act, is fully put inits theoretical context. Based on philosophical, medical, moral and aesthetics texts from the17th century, we ought to ask if, far from being only suffered - as the emotional correlate ofan inaugural ignorance -, wonder can be technically masterd and likely to be produced andreproduced endlessly, for strategic or recreational purposes. When substracted from the strict epistemic requirement, wonder can actually present itself as the specific end of the social existence or of the artistic productions of the Great Century - which can be now regarded asthe century of wonder.

This paper is a case study on Bradley E. Manning, famous for leaking classified intelligence to media, or in the charge sheet’s words: “knowingly give intelligence to the enemy, through indirect means.” My opinion is that this sort of dilemma is a question of values, how you view the world and, most important of all, human rights and the philosophy of rights. Therefore I decided to sort out the arguments regarding the issue of freedom of speech versus the state’s need for protection. To do this I performed a pro et contra analysis from John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty and Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan, this building my theory on which I lean my other work upon. Furthermore, I performed a case study on Manning where I compared the charges and the defense with the arguments of Mill and Hobbes. Ergo: I applied my theory on an existing conflict between freedom of speech and the state’s need for protection to see which arguments that are used in the charge against Manning and if one could derive this from the argumentation analysis consistent of Mill and Hobbes.   Words: 11474

Justice, and what is just, have been discussed by many with no true definition to go by and both political and moral theories alike have tried to find the right definition of what justice is supposed to be. This study will use three political theories to tackle the question if the american election system can be considered just or unjust. The three theories are John Rawls’s Justice as fairness, Thomas Hobbes and the social contract and lastly Robert Nozick’s libertarianism. To analyse the framing of question a normative ‘givet-att’ analyse method will be used, to form arguments from the values presented in the three different theories of justice. The conclusions drawn from the analysis are in the cases of Rawls and Hobbes theories quite similar, on how the election system should be interpreted. Nozick’s theory on the other hand gives a different conclusion compared to the other two. However, the goal of this study is not to find one true answer to whether the election system can be called just or not, but rather to show it from different perspectives of justice and how that can affect the view of the election system.

In recent years, The Swedish Moderate Party have repeatedly used the term social contract. What do they mean by this concept that has its roots in the philosophers during the Enlightenment? These thinkers lived in a different time with political problems of ther time. To answer the reserach question, the Moderates' new proposal for an idea program has acted as a research object and a discriptive idea analysis have been done on the text. To then analyze this material, different Ideal types have been used that have been inspired by Enlightenment philosophers and given diffrent types of contract theories. Central points of the social contract theory have been examined and similair ideas as to the philosophers has been found in the idea proposal, some more than others. New ideas have also been seen that can be linked to the social contract. Finally, it is discussed whether the concept has to some extent lost its meaning or whether it is relevant that the concept does not mean the same thing today as three hundred years ago.

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Abstract: The purpose of this essay is to analyze how populist parties argue for state authority in a way that resembles Thomas Hobbes’s arguments in Leviathan. Moreover, the essay analyzes the characteristics of human nature studied by Thomas Hobbes connecting it to the importance of the National State. The parties analyzed are Sweden Democrats from Sweden, VOX from Spain and Jobbik from Hungary. The research questions are: 1)How do populist parties argue for state authority?  2) How do their arguments resemble Thomas Hobbes’s arguments for state authority in Leviathan? The theories used are related to the study of Thomas Hobbes described in Chapter 13 and 29 in Leviathan related to human nature and state of authority. Moreover, Cas Mudde and Hellström’s theories are used related to populist parties on the right. The method used is a qualitative method which includes an argumentative analysis which aims to explain the essay’s purposes. In conclusion, the analyzed populist parties share the ideas of Thomas Hobbes related to the state of authority and the decrease of corporations in the National State. In other words, the populist parties argue that the national state must be unity and solid in order to defend its own interest and citizens’ interests.

Debatterna om Hobbes och Rousseaus politiska ståndpunkter är långvariga och välpublicerade. Min ambition i denna mylla har varit att koncentrera mig på en fixerad och konstitutiv fråga, nämligen hur deltagande respektive författare tyckte att folket borde vara i fattandet av politiska beslut - sådana svaren formuleras i Leviathan och The Social Contract. Den kontextualistiska metoden synes naturlig för historisk idéanalys, i synnerhet som en betydande del av undersökningen kommer behöva ta itu med hermeneutiska problem: för att ge förståelse åt Hobbes och Rousseaus politiska filosofier är det nämligen nödvändigt att ha kännedom om de kontexter i vilka de formades. Teorin som appliceras är Kuhns teori om paradigm, kompletterad med Foucaults koncept om episteme. Med paradigm respektive episteme menar Kuhn och Foucault ett temporärt a priori-förhållande som definierar den intellektuella räckvidden inom en specifik disciplin. Bakgrunden mot vilken Hobbes Leviathan tolkas är således det stormiga engelska 1600-talet, Richelieus Frankrike (där Hobbes residerade under nästan hela det decennium som föregick skrivandet av Leviathan), hans personliga biografi etc. Kontextualiseringen av The Social Contract inkluderar bl.a. Machiavellis inflytande, Rousseaus personliga biografi, och upplysningen. Hobbes och Rousseau är överens om att suveränen bör ha absolut makt över alla medborgare. Med denna premiss blir frågan hur de definierar suveräniteten central. För Hobbes är suveränen samtliga medborgare sammanfogade till “one and the same Person” i ett förbund där envar avsäger sig sin “Right of Governing” sig själv och transfererar “thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions”. Emellertid  tillägger han att folket endast är “made One Person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented [...] For it is the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One.”  Rousseaus definition av suveräniteten är allmänviljan omsatt i praktik. Skillnaden mellan allas vilja och allmänviljan är att “while the former considers private interest and is merely a sum of particular wills” exkluderar allmänviljan “the pluses and minuses, which mutually cancel each other out” tills endast det gemensamma intresset återstår.  Efter att suveränen etablerats är alla medborgare, enligt Hobbes, förpliktigade att agera unisont i enlighet med de beslut suveränen fattar. I samma anda är suveränen “the sole Legislator”. Sammantaget är Hobbes mening att en person (eller församling) bör vara enväldig beslutsfattare, och att folket, således, inte bör ha något inflytande i politiska frågor. Det är sant att suveränen beskrivs som samtliga medborgare sammanfogade till “one and the same Person”, men då det är tydligt att denne är en faktisk person (eller församling av faktiska personer) och det är “the Unity of the Representer, not the Unity of the Represented, that maketh the Person One” förefaller detta vara av metafysisk innebörd. Övervägande Hobbes svar på frågan - hur deltagande folket borde vara i fattandet av politiska beslut - är det således tydligt att medborgarna inte vid något skede (efter upprättandet av en “commonwealth”) bör vara delaktiga i den politiska beslutsprocessen.  I kontrast till Hobbes menar Rousseau att suveräniteten inte kan representeras. Vidare anser han att “The people subject to the laws should be their author”. Som vi sett är suveräniteten hos Rousseau identisk med allmänviljan omsatt i handling. När allmänviljan ska definieras i en specifik fråga föreslår Rousseau en “assembly of the people” varpå en motion presenteras och var och en “expresses his opinion on this by voting, and the declaration of the general will is taken from the counting of the votes”. Medelst detta system menar han att varje enskild medborgares makt är lika med suveräniteten delat med antalet medborgare. I The Social Contract argumenterar Rousseau följaktligen för att alla medborgare (endast vuxna män) bör vara jämlika i fattandet av politiska beslut. Ställd inför frågan föreslår Rousseau direktdemokratiska och bindande omröstningar - där alla medborgare tillåts rösta och alla röster är likvärdiga.

In this thesis I will offer an extended discussion and critique of an important social constructivist book, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer's Leviathan and the Air-Pump (1985), focusing on its reception and its standing in science and technology studies in the fifteen years since its publication. This work claims to be an "origins" story for the modern form of life that we now call the scientific community, and this claim has not itself been contested strongly by other scholars. Central to Shapin and Schaffer's argument for the socially constructed nature of scientific knowledge, is the contrast they find between the community orientation of Robert Boyle and the anti-community stance of Thomas Hobbes. In the course of this thesis, I question the validity not only of this contrast, but of the origins story itself. I suggest that while experimental, communally-practiced science and modernity did emerge together around the end of the seventeenth-century, the qualities of science that Shapin and Schaffer suggest are distinctive of modern science might more accurately be represented as distinctive of modern science. In other words, I suggest that the story of Leviathan and the Air-Pump is not so much an origins story for science as it is emblematic of the early influence of widespread European modernist culture on scientific practices. Leviathan and the Air-Pump is an important case to study in order to unravel the strands of science and modernity because it occupies simultaneously both the early and late margins of the modern period: first, by taking the contested but emergent modernism represented by Robert Boyle as its subject and, second, as a work of scholarship that sits on the far margins of the modern period. My method is to treat Shapin and Schaffer's work as a central primary source for understanding how contemporary science and technology studies scholarship deals with early modern science. A side product of this analysis is to suggest strongly that Shapin and Schaffer's account of the social construction of scientific knowledge is itself socially constructed: that is, it is highly selective in its presentation and interpretation of historical evidence. I also consider what the implications may be for separating modernity from science, and for thinking about how science might be practiced in the age that will follow -- perhaps is already following -- the modern period. / Master of Science

Phénoménologie de l'espace politique est une étude à la fois généalogique et phénoménologique d'un sujet auquel la philosophie ne se confronte que rarement, à savoir l'espace politique. Les principaux acteurs en sont Maurice Merleau-Ponty et Jan Patočka. Il s'agit donc d'une thèse de philosophie contemporaine, pour ce qui concerne les auteurs étudiés, tandis que l'objet de notre recherche est politique - comme en témoigne le fait que même l'expression «espace politique» n'est pas utilisée dans le domaine philosophique. Puisque notre objectif est de conduire une recherche à la fois politique et phénoménologique sur l'espace politique, il sera essentiel de l'aborder simultanément de ces deux points de vue. Il s'agira en effet de tracer une généalogie de l'espace politique, précédée par une étude phénoménologique du concept d'espace et de celle de mouvement. Nous en tirerons l'idée centrale de la partie plus proprement politique, à savoir l'opposition, dans la pensée politique moderne, entre apparition et représentation, ou en d'autres termes, entre immédiateté et médiation, que l'on peut trouver respectivement chez Machiavel et Hobbes et chez les auteurs qui, au XXe siècle, ont étudié leurs œuvres, notamment Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka et Carl Schmitt. C'est à partir de ces concepts d'apparition et de représentation, et de leur opposition, que nous allons développer une analyse à la fois phénoménologique et politologique de l'espace politique. / Phenomenology of Political Space is an attempt to provide both a genealogical and a phenomenological account of a subject that philosophy rarely confronts, namely political space. Our analysis thus encompasses all the dimensions of political space - political, historical, geographical, and juridical - without dismissing any of them. It aims at showing the intrinsic connection between phenomenology and modern and contemporary political thought. It does so by identifying the two opposing models of political space, respectively shaped by Machiavelli and Hobbes, which we claim correspond to two opposing systems of visibility: a logic of appearance versus a logic of representation. It then moves to the contemporary phenomenological approach and gives both a phenomenology of movement and a phenomenology of political space. The central idea is the opposition, in modern and contemporary political thought, between appearance and representation, or in other words, between immediacy and mediation, as the terms are used respectively by Machiavelli and Hobbes, as well as by other authors who, in the twentieth century, studied their works (Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Jan Patočka, Carl Schmitt). Our current research focuses on both their conceptions of movement, desire and fear; and on their interpretation of political space.

[pt] Com o fim da II Guerra e a queda do III Reich, ganha ímpeto um ataque jusnaturalista ao positivismo jurídico sob o fundamento de que ele foi o pensamento jurídico predominante na Alemanha da República de Weimar e que continuou sendo durante o regime nazista. Desta forma, o positivismo teve responsabilidade tanto pela queda da república quanto pelo funcionamento genocida do regime de Hitler. Iniciando-se com um artigo de Gustav Radbruch, tais ataques prosseguiram nas vozes de diversos antipositivistas e neoconstitucionalistas como Fuller, Dworkin, Alexy e, mais recentemente, David Dyzenhaus, jurista com quem a presente tese procura debater. Contra estes argumentos, pretende-se aqui refutá-los a partir das categorias fantasmagoria e hostilidade, extraídas do pensamento político-jurídico de Thomas Hobbes. A primeira procura demonstrar que o pensamento jurídico nazista era calcado em uma forma transcendental e eseencialista de pensar, implicando uma concepção do direito como algo já dado e que deveria ser realizado. A segunda determinava que, para realizar esta fantasmagoria, a forma jurídica poderia ser completamente afastada, de modo que o regime nazista, na verdade, seria antipositivista. Com isto, tanto a partir da teoria de Hobbes quanto de exemplos históricos, a presente tese procura afastar tal mito sobre o positivismo, afirmando que, ao contrário, o pensamento jurídico nazista era mais próximo do jusnaturalismo, e que as teses antipositivistas e neoconstitucionalistas de abertura do direito à moral, ao contrário do que pretendem, podem acabar por fornecer meios de ascensão de regimes autoritários, de modo que uma interpretação formal do direito deve ser vista como mais adequada do que uma jurisprudência de princípios. / [en] With the end of World War II and the fall of the Third Reich, a jusnaturalist attack on legal positivism gained momentum on the ground that it was the predominant legal thought in the German Weimar Republic and continued to be so during the Nazi regime. In this way, positivism was responsible both for the fall of the republic and for the genocidal functioning of the Hitler regime. Starting with an article by Gustav Radbruch, such attacks continued in the voices of several antipositivists and neo-constitutionalists such as Fuller, Dworkin, Alexy and more recently David Dyzenhaus, a jurist whose arguments this thesis intends to debate. Against these arguments, the objective here is to refute them with the help of the concepts of phantasmagoria and hostility, extracted from the political-juridical thought of Thomas Hobbes. The first concept seeks to demonstrate that Nazi legal thinking was modeled on a transcendental and essentialist way, implying a conception of law as an a priori that should be realized. The second concept determined that in order to realize this phantasmagoria, the legal form could be completely removed. Thus, the Nazi regime, in fact, would be anti-positivist. Thereby, both with the help of Hobbes s theory and historical examples, this thesis aims to dispel such a myth about positivism, stating that, on the contrary, Nazi legal thought was closer to natural-law, and that the anti-positivist and neo-constitutionalist theses, contrary to what intend or claim, may ultimately provide help to authoritarian regimes seize power. Thus, a formalist law interpretation must be seen as more appropriate than an interpretation based on principles.