Mortal Gods by Ted H Miller
Argues against the accepted idea that Thomas Hobbes turned away from humanism to pursue the scientific study of politics. Reconceptualizes Hobbes's thought within early modern humanist pedagogy and the court culture of the Stuart regimes.“Ted Miller's Mortal Gods is a great book, historically rich and theoretically innovativeHis argument that Hobbes's humanist mathematical science is aggressively creative rather than descriptive or prescriptive institutes a debate where there has tended to be the consensus of a dominant interpretation. In prose that is fresh and lively, this is a provocative and rewarding read.”
—Samantha Frost, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
“Ted Miller makes a persuasive, nuanced, and surprising case for leaving behind the view that Hobbes’s development as a thinker proceeded in two or three distinct phases. Miller shows Hobbes’s thought to be dynamically unified. . . . Hobbes’s signal innovation was to have recognized the persuasive rhetorical power of mathematical reasoning among influential elites and seized upon it as a means for reforming philosophical inquiry. The combination accounts, in Miller’s view, for the striking originality of Hobbes’s political philosophy. Miller’s deeply learned and richly detailed account offers an engaging portrait of Hobbes’s intellectual and cultural milieu—from the mathematical debates of his day, to the grand court masques of the Stuart era, to the plastic arts of theater and architecture. Along the way, Miller offers solid correctives to Quentin Skinner’s influential readings of Hobbes; engages the style, purposes, and effects of Hobbes’s work more broadly; and offers potent reflections on the relations of humanism, modernity, and politics.”
—Dean Mathiowetz, University of California, Santa Cruz
“This rigorously argued and thought-provoking book challenges various received views of Hobbes by means of a few deceptively simple, mutually reinforcing interpretive moves.”
—Ted McCormick Journal of British Studies
“For a latter-day audience, theology and mathematics are the thorniest branches of Hobbes’s philosophy. Not only does Mortal Gods illuminate both but, more importantly, Miller establishes the connection between them and, by doing so, brings out the grandiosity of Hobbes’s linkage of God and monarch.”
—Deborah Baumgold History of Political Thought
“Miller exemplifies a new kind of historicism. . . . Mustering resources of erudition toward nonantiquarian ends, he helps to liberate Hobbes scholarship from methodological constraints that have grown increasingly confining.”
—Julie E. Cooper Perspectives on Politics
Ted H. Miller is Associate Professor of Political Science at the University of Alabama.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780271048925 |
| ISBN 10 | 0271048921 |
| Title | Mortal Gods |
| Author | Ted H Miller |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | Pennsylvania State University Press |
| Year published | 2015-04-15 |
| Number of pages | 344 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |