Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

The term “author” needs to be understood in conjunction with its correlative “actor.” An actor is a person whose behavior – Hobbes uses the term “action” – is attributed to someone or something else. The author is the person to whom the action is attributed whether or not she is the one who performed the behavior that resulted in the action. When a human being acts for herself, she is both the actor and the author (L 16.4–5; DH 14.2). It is unlikely that Hobbes used these two terms primarily because of their use in the dramatic arts. Hobbes rarely mentions drama or the theater at all, and since the theater was considered disreputable by a large portion of the population, it is unlikely that he would have taken an aspect of it as his model. In the seventeenth century, independently of each other, “actor” had the sense of an agent or representative and “author” had the sense of one who causes an action or authorizes another. Nonetheless, the analogy to the theater is apt. A stage actor recites the lines written for her by the play's author, and those lines may be attributed to the author even though they are spoken by the actor.Hobbes's brief description of an actor does not make it clear whether the physical behavior of an actor can be attributed to a nonhuman. My guess is that it cannot. Hobbes introduces the idea of an actor at the end of his treatment of what natural and artificial ... log in or subscribe to read full text