Lessons from a Materialist Thinker

Samantha Frost is Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science and the Gender and Women's Studies Program at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

• :Contents Acknowledgmentsxxx Introduction1 1Hobbes and the Matter of Self-Consciousness000 2Hobbes and the Caprice of Reason000 3The Time of Determination: Movement, Will, and Action000 4The Ethics in Determinism: Inter-subjectivity, the Collective, and Peace000 5The Action and Passion of Politics: Hobbes on Power000 Notes000 Bibliography000 Index000

"[Frost] is an exquisitely careful and attentive reader and she demonstrates a Talmudic reverence for Hobbes' texts, one that allows her to read his books as if the last three hundred and fifty odd years of heavy interpretive authority had never happened. This is a singular accomplishment and because of it, Frost has written one of the most important books on Hobbes for quite some time." - James R. Martel (Theory & Event) "This is an intensively philosophical book that speaks importantly to issues in the philosophy of mind, of action, and of responsibility. The author is fully conversant with Cartesian and post-Cartesian anti-materialism and has a refined and complex understanding of the Hobbesean alternative to it. As the term "lessons" indicates, Frost aims to help us escape from Cartesian ways of thinking and to move us to a sense of ourselves and one another as material, embodied beings who can and should relate to one another in sinuous but mutually productive ways." - Richard Flathman (The Johns Hopkins University) "Drawing upon Thomas Hobbes' well-known if dark concept of the brutal self at war with all others, as juxtaposed with a Cartesian view of the self split into the mind and the body, Lessons from a Materialist Thinker questions tacitly occurring assumptions humans make about themselves as well as the common, negative view of Hobbes' insight A welcome contribution to philosophical studies shelves, especially for its insights into the border where philosophy and politics meets concepts of sociology and anthropology." - The Midwest Book Review