The Art of War

[Michael F]

Richard,

I agree with your take on Hobbes, but then again some of the 20th
Century's finest thinkers believed Hobbes to be one of the
"esoteric/exoteric" thinkers, and that he never left his main points
as being accessible for surface readers.  Me, I tend to see Leviathon
as laying out the result of the foreward movement of Western
Modernity.  So far, he's pretty much on the money.  Prof. Leon Craig
recently released a very interesting book on Leviathon and uses it to
read Moby Dick and Heart of Darkness.  Amazing study.

Alice,

I've always found Pinker interesting.  He's one of the few big
university names that is known around the country who has never
knee-jerkingly espoused a political agenda.  Pinker is a "reasonable"
prof.  I tend to think up in Boston he's split between the materialism
of Chomsky and spirit of Harvey Mansfield.  From what I understand
Mansfield has been able to tame the most fiery of the Cultural
Warriors.  Every university town should have two guys like  Chomsky
and Mansfield to keep folks on their toes.

Mike

On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 9:00 PM, Richard Fiero <rfiero at gmail.com> wrote:
> alice wellintown wrote:
>>
>> http://www.edge.org/3rd_culture/pinker07/pinker07_index.html
>>
>> On Tue, Dec 28, 2010 at 8:30 PM, alice wellintown
>> <alicewellintown at gmail.com> wrote:
>> >> "They recognize universal values or ethics
>> >> but fail to consider how pluralistic ones often create paradoxes and
>> >> deadlocks."
>> >>. . .
>
> From the above URL:
> A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE
> by Steven Pinker
>
> "The first is that Hobbes got it right. Life in a state of nature is nasty,
> brutish, and short, not because of a primal thirst for blood but because of
> the inescapable logic of anarchy. Any beings with a modicum of self-interest
> may be tempted to invade their neighbors to steal their resources. The
> resulting fear of attack will tempt the neighbors to strike first in
> preemptive self-defense, which will in turn tempt the first group to strike
> against them preemptively, and so on."
>
> This is an especially paranoid game theory just as John Nash developed it at
> RAND in the fifties. I'm also not sure of his use of the word anarchy since
> he uses it where State security features are weak that may allow the
> formation of pirate bands and so on. It's unlikely that any group of pirates
> practices anarchy.
>
>
>