Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's "Leviathan": The Power of Mind over Matter (review)

498 JOURNAL OF THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 3~:3 JULY ~994 direct realist (177). In his earlier study, Nadler made the same claim, more plausibly, on behalf of Arnauld, and some readers may wonder whether Nadler is overeager to claim all Cartesians for the direct realist camp. Perhaps it is simply misleading to seek to interpret Malebranche in terms of the familiar dichotomy between direct realism and the representative theory of perception. Moreover, at one point Nadler's argument seems distinctly vulnerable. He seeks to show that Malebranche cannot understand the term 'perceive' univocaily when he speaks of perceiving both ideas and bodies. In support of this claim Nadler argues that "whatever the 'perception' of ideas is, it is not sense perception, which ~ our mode of apprehending existing material bodies" (165). But Nadler has not clearly succeeded in driving a wedge between the two cases. Granted, our perception of Malebranchian ideas is thoroughly intellectual, but if our perception of bodies is indirect and inferential, then it too is intellectual in nature. To argue that the term 'perception' must be equivocal because we perceive bodies through the senses looks suspiciously question-begging. Here as elsewhere Nadler perhaps does less than justice to Malebranche's desire to interpret the Cartesian doctrine that we perceive bodies through the intellect, not through the senses. But even if Nadler overplays his hand somewhat, his attack on the traditional reading of Malebranche's theory of perception is fresh and stimulating; it should open the way for a lively debate. Malebranche and Ideas is a distinguished addition to the growing body of AngloAmerican literature on an unjustly neglected philosopher. Through its clarity, philosophical acumen, and Complete command of the texts, this book helps to set standards for Malebranche scholarship which subsequent writers will find hard to emulate. NICHOLAS JOLLEY University of California, San Diego S. A. Lloyd. Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's "Leviathan": The Power of Mind over Matter. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1992. Pp. xi + 396. Cloth, $54-95Ideals as Interests in Hobbes's "Leviathan" contributes to Hobbes scholarship by making it perfectly clear that Hobbes does not say everything that he has long been taken to say. In fact, the first chapter of the book is essential reading for anyone interested in the history of moral/political philosophy, and it should1 be read twice by anyone seriously interested in understanding Hobbes. The main thrust of this chapter is to demonstrate that the standard interpretation of Hohbes's theory produces "a richly criticizable philosophy" (92) which is, nevertheless, not supported by the text. Professor Lloyd takes the main tenets of the standard view to be that Hobbes is an egoist and a moral subjectivist who has a preservation-centered conception of human nature because he takes fear of death to be the dominant human motivation. She presents carefully defended arguments for rejecting each of these interpretive theses. By drawing attention to many passages of the text Lloyd convincingly demonstrates that the standard view is incompatible with Lev/athan. She also points out that the standard view of Hobbes virtually ignores more than half of the book, namely, Parts 3 BOOa REVIEWS 499 and 4- Futhermore, the standard view is deficient because it cannot explain the problem of recurrent disorder which obviously was a central concern for Hobbes. Lloys observes that Hobbes acknowledges reasons other than self-preservation as potentially having stronger motivational power than fear of death. She calls the idealS or interests which are "worth risking preservation to satisfy" (314) transcendent interests . Religious obligation and concern for avoiding eternal damnation are the particular transcendent interests which motivated many of Hobbes's seventeenth-century contemporaries to disrupt social order. Hobbes's attention to these transcendent interests in Parts 3 and 4 of Leviathan demonstrates not only that he does not construe human motivation to focus simply on self-preservation, but that he takes these transcendent concerns to be the cause of the civil unrest in his time. Readers who overlook his concern with transcendent motivations fail to see that Hobbes addresses them squarely in his attention to the need for education in the creation of order and in what Lloyd describes as his "rationalizing...