Rilla, J; (2020) How natural is hobbes’s natural person? History of Political Thought , 41 (4) pp. 559-585.

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Abstract

This paper deals with Hobbes’s category of ‘natural person’. Although this notion could be interpreted in purely natural terms, namely as referring to the human body and its specific accidents (sensation, passions, speech and reason), it will become clear that its main trait is artificiality. To be more precise, we will show that a natural person is analogous to an actor performing on a stage. Since elaborating a character that acts in accordance with the expectations of an audience involves several tools of artifice, the title of the paper acquires greater significance and calls for a recasting: is Hobbes’s natural person natural at all? With the purpose of giving a definite answer we will demonstrate that its genuinely natural feature is the human body, understood not as a physio-biological object, but as the ultimate responsibility locus of the person’s performance. In other words, natural persons are natural insomuch as their bodies may be held accountable for their misdeeds.

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