Nasty, Brutish, and Short: Adventures in Philosophy with Kids

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Thomas, Hobbes (2006). Thomas Hobbes: Leviathan. Rogers, G. A. J.,, Schuhmann, Karl (A criticaled.). London: Bloomsbury Publishing. p.12. ISBN 9781441110985. OCLC 882503096. I missed the first day of that philosophy class, because my people—Jews, not philosophers—celebrate the New Year at a more or less random time each fall. But I went to the second class, and by the second hour I was hooked. The professor, Clark Wolf, asked each of us what mattered, and as he went around the room, he scratched our answers on the board alongside our names and the names of famous philosophers who had said something similar.

Following an agenda set by Rex and Hank, Hershovitz takes us on a fun romp through classic and contemporary philosophy, powered by questions like, Does Hank have the right to drink soda? When is it okay to swear? and, Does the number six exist? Hershovitz and his boys take on more weighty issues too. They explore punishment, authority, sex, gender, race, the nature of truth and knowledge, and the existence of God. Along the way, they get help from professional philosophers, famous and obscure. And they show that all of us have a lot to learn from listening to kids—and thinking with them. But I am a philosopher. And I still find that improbable. I didn’t set out to be one. As a first-semester freshman at the University of Georgia, I wanted to take Intro Psychology. But the class was full, and Intro Philosophy fulfilled a requirement. If a spot had come open in that psychology class, then I might be a psychologist and this book might be full of practical parenting advice. There is a bit of parenting advice in this book, but most of it is not so practical. Indeed, my main advice is just this: talk to your kids (or somebody else’s). They’re funny as hell—and good philosophers too. The following week, my philosophy of law class talked about prepunishment—the idea that we might punish someone before they commit a crime if we know, beyond a reasonable doubt, that they’ll doit. Some people doubt that it’s possible to predict well enough to know. I don’t, actually. But there’s another objection that’s a lot like Hank’s.The argument has problems. Why does the cha n of causes have to come to an end? Perhaps the universe is eternal—endless in both directions. And even if there was a First Cause , why think it was God? But it doesn’t matter whether the argument works. (We’ll ask whether God exists in chapter 12.) The point is simply to see that Sarah reproduced its logic. “Here I am teaching my university students the argument for a First Cause,” Matthews wrote, “and my four-year-old daughter comes up, on her own, with an argument for the First Flea!” Because a successive covenant cannot override a prior one, the subjects cannot (lawfully) change the form of government. Hobbes describes human psychology without any reference to the summum bonum, or greatest good, as previous thought had done. According to Hobbes, not only is the concept of a summum bonum superfluous, but given the variability of human desires, there could be no such thing. Consequently, any political community that sought to provide the greatest good to its members would find itself driven by competing conceptions of that good with no way to decide among them. The result would be civil war. Reading his impressions reminded me of the first time I stood inside Bosnia while looking over Croatia and realized that despite all the wars which get fought there is no visible line to show you where one side ends and the other begins. We may have maps, Google Earth and GPS systems that insist a line is drawn down the land to ensure ownership but when you’re standing there it doesn’t exist.

This considered, the kingdom of darkness... is nothing else but a confederacy of deceivers that, to obtain dominion over men in this present world, endeavour, by dark and erroneous doctrines, to extinguish in them the light... [17] Because the covenant forming the commonwealth results from subjects giving to the sovereign the right to act for them, the sovereign cannot possibly breach the covenant; and therefore the subjects can never argue to be freed from the covenant because of the actions of the sovereign. Equal parts hilarious (for years, Hank kept up a facade of not knowing the alphabet to worry his dad) and profound (4-year-old Rex: ‘I think that, for real, God is pretend, and for pretend, God is real’) . . . clear and lively . . . A playful yet serious introduction to philosophy.”— KirkusLorenzo: If I survive long enough to get it! Right now it feels like my life is nasty, brutish, and short. People are skeptical when I say that kids peer through that window. Sure, you came up with the shifted color spectrum, they say. But you turned out to be a philosopher. That’s not a normal thing for a kid to do. I might have believed them if I didn’t have kids myself. I’ve got two boys: Hank, whom you’ve already met, and Rex, who’s a few years older. By the time Rex was three, he was saying things that implicated philosophical issues, even if he didn’t yet see them himself. In Part III Hobbes seeks to investigate the nature of a Christian commonwealth. This immediately raises the question of which scriptures we should trust, and why. If any person may claim supernatural revelation superior to the civil law, then there would be chaos, and Hobbes' fervent desire is to avoid this. Hobbes thus begins by establishing that we cannot infallibly know another's personal word to be divine revelation:

Every subject is author of the acts of the sovereign: hence the sovereign cannot injure any of his subjects and cannot be accused of injustice. The sovereign exists because the majority has consented to his rule; the minority have agreed to abide by this arrangement and must then assent to the sovereign's actions. As to the question who shall appoint the successor of a monarch that hath the sovereign authority... we are to consider that either he that is in possession has right to dispose of the succession, or else that right is again in the dissolved multitude. ... Therefore it is manifest that by the institution of monarchy, the disposing of the successor is always left to the judgement and will of the present possessor.This is the only parenting book I would insist everyone read, whether they have kids or not. Hershovitz is a total delight—energetic, compassionate, patient, wise, and very, very funny, even when he is talking about weighty or difficult ideas. I'm grateful to have him as a model for how to talk to my children and how to think alongside them.” —Merve Emre, author of The Personality Brokers

Franco: Actually, I was thinking of traveling to an area with high poverty and volunteering my time to help the children there. Discover the landmark book about the power of first impressions that has revolutionized the way we understand intuition and decision making, from #1 bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell. In his witty and learned book Nasty, Brutish, and Short, Hershovitz intertwines parenting and philosophy, recounting his spirited arguments with his kids about infinity, morality, and the existence of God, and teaching half a liberal arts curriculum along the way Jordan Ellenberg, New York Times Bestselling author of Shape Leviathan: Or the Matter, Forme, and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civill, ed. by Ian Shapiro (Yale University Press; 2010). Rogers, Graham Alan John. Leviathan – contemporary responses to the political theory of Thomas Hobbes Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 1995.

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The difference of Commonwealths consisted in the difference of the sovereign, or the person representative of all and every one of the multitude. And because the sovereignty is either in one man, or in an assembly of more than one; and into that assembly either every man hath right to enter, or not every one, but certain men distinguished from the rest; it is manifest there can be but three kinds of Commonwealth. For the representative must needs be one man, or more; and if more, then it is the assembly of all, or but of a part. When the representative is one man, then is the Commonwealth a monarchy; when an assembly of all that will come together, then it is a democracy, or popular Commonwealth; when an assembly of a part only, then it is called an aristocracy.