homas Hobbes includes "curiosity" to an extended catalogue of the passions that he principally distinguishes as beneficial or detrimental to human kind. In this light curiosity holds up a prominent position in his thought which he considers as the motivating factor that leads people to discover new worlds and broaden their horizons. An indicative definition of curiosity as found in Hobbes' Leviathan proceeds as follows: Desire to know why, and how, curiosity; such as is in no living creature but man: so that man is distinguished, not only by his reason, but also by this singular passion from other animals; in whom the appetite of food, and other pleasures of sense, by predominance, take away the care of knowing causes; which is a lust of the mind, that by a perseverance of delight in the continual and indefatigable generation of knowledge, exceedeth the short vehemence of any carnal pleasure. 1
In this work, we use machine learning techniques to address a research question regarding the authorship attribution of two famous essays in the nineteenth century. On Liberty (1859) and The Subjection of Women (1869) were published under John Stuart Mill's name, a widely studied nineteenth-century British philosopher. Mill himself attributed them to collaboration with his wife and partner, Harriet Taylor Mill. More than 150 years later, the question remains whether the author of these two canonical texts in the history of political thought, was solely John Stuart Mill. Experts are divided on taking John Stuart Mill's attribution at face value, since Harriet Taylor Mill had died in 1858. Addressing this question, we use a dataset consisted in essays of both authors, to train three state-of-the-art classifiers that are able to learn and distinguish the writing style of each author. Then, we use the models built to attribute the two famous essays of disputed authorship to one of the two. From the results, we conclude that the classifiers are able to learn the two classes very well, and they return high accuracies on the validation set. Regarding the test set, most of the models attribute the two essays to John Stuart Mill, however, the contribution of Harriet Taylor Mill is shown for some chunks of text of both essays. These results, we conclude, explain why experts are divided on this particular research question.
homas Hobbes' ideas concerning the right education of the citizen and the subsequent sense of indoctrination caused by the dissemination of foreign political teachings into native English lands, is an issue of great interest that has been largely overlooked in the relative literature. This article is a part of the work in progress which aims to broaden the discussion concerning Hobbes' thoughts about education and the prominent position that this aspect holds in his civil science as a whole. The main focus of this text is to explore Hobbes' proclaimed concerns about the unrestricted dissemination of political knowledge among misinformed citizens with controversial beliefs and about the possible undesirable consequences of this dissemination. The term "State anti-cosmopolitanism" that I will be employing here proposes a reading of Hobbes that detects elitist and exclusivist (hence anti-cosmopolitan) operations at work in his political theory of pedagogy. It will be shown that Hobbes singles out the instructor and scholar as the paradigmatic cosmopolitan figure of the time. This figure is "provided with the antidote of solid reason" 1 and by being protected from the risks of indoctrination, he thereby protects the "borders" of learning and staves off the political consequences that Hobbes deems dangerous to the masses. For the purpose of this analysis I mainly concentrate on Leviathan while sporadically drawing insights from Hobbes' mature works that resonate with his educational thought. 2
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