NDPR Thomas Holden Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion

0 views

Skip to first unread message

ndpr...@nd.edu

unread,

Nov 19, 2025, 9:32:43 AM (3 days ago) Nov 19

to philosophical...@nd.edu, philosophical-...@nd.edu, philosophical-...@nd.edu, philosophical-...@nd.edu

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.11.7 View this Review Online View Other NDPR Reviews

Thomas Holden, Hobbes’s Philosophy of Religion, Oxford University Press, 2023, 244pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780192871329.

Reviewed by Arash Abizadeh, McGill University

Commentators have traditionally assumed that the key interpretive question concerning Hobbes’s theology is whether he was a theist (as he proclaimed) or an atheist (as many seventeenth-century critics charged). Holden’s excellent book rejects this assumption, criticizing both traditional theistic and atheistic interpreters, arguing that the central issue in Hobbes’s philosophy of religion concerns not belief but meaning: on Holden’s account, Hobbes pioneered—well before Berkeley—an expressivist treatment of religious language. The key to Hobbes’s extensive treatment of religion is his distinction between the descriptive use of language, which expresses beliefs or propositions and is governed by norms of truth, versus its...