Psychology Dictionary of Arguments

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Humans: Humans, or Homo sapiens, are the most intelligent and widespread species of primates. Humans are characterized by bipedalism, large brains, and capacity for articulate speech and abstract reasoning. Humans are social creatures who live in complex societies. See also Society, Reason, Thinking, Brain, Intelligence, Language.
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Annotation: The above characterizations of concepts are neither definitions nor exhausting presentations of problems related to them. Instead, they are intended to give a short introduction to the contributions below. – Lexicon of Arguments.

 
Author Concept Summary/Quotes Sources

Thomas Hobbes on Humans - Dictionary of Arguments

I 218
Human/Hobbes/Höffe: Even if Hobbes speaks the word of absolutism, with him the human being as a person already becomes the subject and measure of the political order. But it is not the essence of equal dignity, neither in its secular determination as a gift of language and reason nor in its religious determination as an image of God.
Human rights: In any case, there can be no talk of human rights or fundamental rights in the natural state. What matters is the same weakness and vulnerability. After all, through cunning or through association with others, the weaker ones can kill even the strongest.
As a result, the natural desire for happiness runs the risk of people throwing each other into misery.
>Civil war
, >Natural state.
Hobbes/VsMachiavelli: Unlike Machiavelli, this danger does not arise from a pessimistic view of humanity (fed by political realism). According to Hobbes, people are not, as Machiavelli says in the Prince, "ungrateful, fickle, mendacious, hypocritical and greedy" (1).
War of all against all/Hobbes: The misery is rather the result of living together without a community: without statehood people live in a state of war of all against all.
Aggression/Civil War/Hobbes/Höffe: (...) with the latent, not necessarily actual violence in the natural state, Hobbes does not claim that the human being is inherently aggressive and destructive. >War/Hobbes.
For him, human passions are non-judgmental driving forces that are realistically accepted as they are. The human is not antisocial in a moral sense, that is to say evil; he is not even innocently evil. His basic passion, the striving for free self-preservation and for happiness (...) leads to the (...) inevitable antisocial tendency, the tendency to violence.

1. Machiavelli, Il Principe Chap. XVII

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Explanation of symbols: Roman numerals indicate the source, arabic numerals indicate the page number. The corresponding books are indicated on the right hand side. ((s)…): Comment by the sender of the contribution. Translations: Dictionary of Arguments
The note [Concept/Author], [Author1]Vs[Author2] or [Author]Vs[term] resp. "problem:"/"solution:", "old:"/"new:" and "thesis:" is an addition from the Dictionary of Arguments. If a German edition is specified, the page numbers refer to this edition.

Hobbes I
Thomas Hobbes
Leviathan: With selected variants from the Latin edition of 1668 Cambridge 1994


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