Robison, Meghan. Hobbes’s Body Politics: From Life to Accountability in Leviathan. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, Forthcoming.

Morgan, Jon. “Non-Inferential Knowledge of Perception.” Philosophers’ Imprint,��2025.

Robison, Meghan. “Dominion without Domination: Modernizing Parental Authority in Hobbes, Locke and Rousseau.” In The Edinburgh Critical History of Early Modern and Enlightenment Philosophy. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2025.

Roholt, Tiger. “Performance, Technology, and the Good Life.” In The Oxford Handbook of the Phenomenology of Music. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Forthcoming.

Robison, Meghan. “Self-Consciousness and Mutual Recognition in Hobbes’s Leviathan.” Hobbes Studies 38, no. 2 (2025): 143–66.

Robison, Meghan. “Reanimating Hobbes’s Materialism: Afterthoughts on Samantha Frost’s Lessons from a Materialist Thinker.” Hobbes Studies (October 2024).

Robison, Meghan. “Foundations in J. Matthew Hoye’s Sovereignty as a Vocation: New Foundations Statecraft and Virtue in Hobbes’s Leviathan.” European Hobbes Society Online Colloquium, October 2024.

Morgan, Jon. “What the Senses Cannot ‘Say’.” Philosophical Quarterly 73, no. 2 (2023).

Robison, Meghan. “Mother Lords: Original Maternal Dominion and the Practice of Preservation in Hobbes.” Hypatia 38, no. 1 (2023).

Roholt, Tiger. Distracted from Meaning: A Philosophy of Smartphones. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2023.

Morgan, Jon. “Content Externalism without Thought Experiments?” Analysis 82, no. 1 (2022).

Robison, Meghan. “From Expansionist Power to the Erosion of Bios in Arendt’s Interpretation of Hobbes.” Arendt Studies 6 (2022).

Morgan, Jon. “The Phenomenal Representation of Size.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy 99, no. 4 (2021).

Roholt, Tiger. “Being-with Smartphones.” Techné: Research in Philosophy and Technology 25, no. 2 (2021).

Robison, Meghan. “The Appearance of Power in Hobbes’ Leviathan.” Scienza & Politica 31, no. 60 (2019).

Morgan, Jon. “Naïve Realism and Phenomenal Overlap.” Philosophical Studies 174, no. 5 (2017): 1243–53.

Roholt, Tiger. “On the Divide: Analytic and Continental Philosophy of Music.” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism75, no. 1 (2017).

Recent Conference Presentations

• Tiger Roholt is giving a talk on subjectivity in life’s meaning at Siena University, April 2026.

• Tiger Roholt delivered the paper, “Meaning in Practice,” at the Seventh International Conference on Philosophy and Meaning in Life, at Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada. June 2025.

• Meghan Robison delivered the paper, “,” at the New School for Social Research. April 17, 2025.

• Meghan Robison delivered the paper, “Doing Things with Dolls,” at the University of Milano-Bicocca. February 18, 2025.

• Jon Morgan delivered the paper “Carving Up Phenomenal Space,” at the 111th Annual Meeting of the Southern Society for Philosophy and Psychology. Cincinnati, Ohio. March, 2019.

• Meghan Robison delivered the paper, “Mother Lords and the Power of Preserving Life in Hobbes‘s Leviathan,” at the International Workshop on Hobbes and Gender, Institute for Political Science, FAU (Erlangen and Nuremberg, Germany). November 22–23, 2018.

• Meghan Robison delivered the paper, “Human Power Reconsidered: the Point of View of Life,” at Hobbes e il potere, University of Florence. May 17, 2018.

• Meghan Robison delivered the paper, “Life in Hobbes’ Leviathan,” at Colloque International Thomas Hobbes, October 27, 2017, Paris.

• Meghan Robison delivered the paper, “A Motion of Limbs: On the Movement of Life in Hobbes’ Leviathan,” at the Critical Philosophy of Life Conference at Duquesne University, hosted by Duquesne Women in Philosophy, March 24-25, 2017.

• Meghan Robison delivered the paper, “Moving in the State of Nature,” at the American Philosophical Association, Eastern Division Meeting, January, 2017.

Abstract
Hobbes’s justification for original maternal dominion is often evaluated in connection to the ambiguous status of women in his political thought. Many feminist interpreters explain this ambiguity as a contradiction: following Carole Pateman, they see maternal dominion as one term of the “paradox of parental power.” The first aim of this article is to elaborate a second, alternative approach within some critical responses to Pateman’s reading. Rather than as one part of a contradiction, in these interpretations maternal dominion emerges as a self-standing form of authority that is very different from patriarchal domination. By offering a new synthesis of some of these interpretations, I aim to show this second view as more comprehensive and compelling than that offered by Pateman. Then, building upon this view, I give a new reading of the concept of preservation that establishes the mother’s dominion as an intersubjective practice that reflects an awareness about the interdependent conditions for human well-being and, hence, challenges the standard approach to Hobbesian individualism and sovereign power. Finally, drawing from my interpretation of preservation, I offer a new way to understand Hobbes’s argument that “parental authority is derived from the child’s consent.”