A rediscovered lost memoir about John Locke

Part of the attraction is a kind of zero-sum ego trip. Bringing stars down to earth lets me believe that I'm closer to having "made it" in some vague, ill-defined way, without ever having to leave the couch.

Quite possibly it's valid, but it seems as though the certainty of TFA could be overplayed.

tldr: scholars have never been able to say very much concrete about John Locke's intellectual relationship to Thomas Hobbes, despite these two dudes being the most important 17th-century English political philosophers. Locke's work often appears to be responding to Hobbes, but he conspicuously never mentions him by name. But wait! This new manuscript is a (third-hand) account saying that Locke read Hobbes's Leviathan closely earlier in his life and even recommended the book to others, but later would deny that he ever read it. (Also the manuscript says some other mean things about Locke which are of maybe less scholarly interest.)

It's an interesting sort of find, although 17th-century intellectual history was not my specialty when I was a historian so it's hard to say how really important it is in terms of reorienting that sub-field. Bigger picture, I suppose it depends on how much you care about what Locke thought of Hobbes.

[0] https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/714068

Philosophy almost by definition requires a good ability to skip work to just sit down and think deeply about things, something you can't really do expediently or while busy with life. If you go merrily about doing whatever needs doing you're like not unhappy enough with the state of things to ask yourself some big questions.

It also requires a good ability to repackage ideas, many of which have been ill-presented by original authors or far ahead of their time, to an audience in a manner that makes them receptive to them. Most philosophers spend far more time engaging in dialogue with existing ideas instead of making their own.

More knowledge and less lobbying please.