Clarendon edition of Leviathan (Hobbes 2012), which provides English (1651) and Latin (1668) facing pages of that work, and Deborah Baumgold’s Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory (Baumgold 2017), which offers side-by-side comparison of passages in Elements of Law, De cive, and Leviathan. Alongside close attention to textual details, this approach might also examine Hobbes’s preceding context and influences as well as his immediate context, such as his correspondence (Hobbes 1994b) or the notes on his works as they were in the process of being written, such as Robert Payne’s on De corpore held in the Chatsworth House Hobbes papers (Chatsworth A10).
Another approach to Hobbes’s ideas could excise key arguments, or parts of those arguments, from his corpus and examine them on their own philosophical merits with less attention to textual minutiae. Such a method would seek to offer something like a rational reconstruction, holding Hobbes subject to requirements such as logical consistency and deductive validity, and in doing so seek to provide the best possible picture of what Hobbes sought to demonstrate. Rather than accusing Hobbes of being misguided, or at times even sloppy in his argumentation, this way of engaging Hobbes might attempt to explain away interpretational difficulties here and there with the aim of constructing a philosophically palatable system. Even if it might depart at times from Hobbes’s own explicit statements, taking such an approach may help bring Hobbes’s philosophy to bear upon pressing present-day issues and potentially offer guidance about moral quandaries.4
The present volume has been organized under the assumption that these two approaches to studying Hobbes, i.e., the textual/philological approach and the philosophical approach, are not mutually exclusive.5 Our attempts at understanding a figure like Hobbes are aided by close textual and philological engagement with the aim of trying to understanding what Hobbes might have been saying. But these efforts can also be helped by stepping back from the text, as it were, and probing his viewpoints philosophically with the aim of trying to understand what Hobbes should have been saying, what he was committed to in one area given his claims in another, and what import his ideas might have for us today.
Why feature Hobbes in a series like the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, especially since the range of Hobbes’s works is so diverse? Would Hobbes have viewed himself primarily as a philosopher and not, say, as a humanist or mathematician?6 Hobbes did much beyond what today we call by the name ‘philosophy’, such as his labors, mentioned already, in translating works from Antiquity. However, the scope of Hobbes’s own definition of ‘philosophy’ in De corpore I.2 was incredibly broad insofar as it included any phenomenon where causes could be conceived, whether from actual causes to effects or from effects to possible causes (Hobbes 1981, 175; OL I.2). Given this definition of ‘philosophy,’ it is no surprise that Hobbes appealed to causes in contexts such as his geometry, with generative definitions like “a line is made from the motion of a point” (Hobbes 1981, 297; OL I.63), and to possible causes throughout his natural philosophy in De corpore Part IV. The appeal to causes is likewise prominent in his famous account in civil philosophy “Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Common-wealth” (Hobbes 2012, 254; 1651, 85).
Given this definition that delineates philosophy from all else, it seems that Hobbes himself might have excluded some of his own works from philosophy since they failed to treat of causes. Indeed, he says in De corpore I.8 that “where there is no generation or no properties, then no philosophy can be known” (Hobbes 1981, 189; OL I.9). There Hobbes declares that natural history and political history are not part of philosophy because “such knowledge [cognitio] is either experience or authority, not reasoning” (Hobbes 1981, 189; OL I.9). Thus, at first glance it would seem that Hobbes’s definition of ‘philosophy’ excludes some of his own works, such as Behemoth; Or an Epitome of the Civil Wars of England, From 1640, to 1660 (2010) since it is prima facie a work of history.
Perhaps we might see such work as done in the service of philosophy rather than as a part of philosophy proper. After all, Hobbes himself admits that natural and civil histories are “very useful (no, indeed necessary) for philosophy” (Hobbes 1981, 189; OL I.9). However, his interests in the civil war of his own time, as well as historical work on prior times, were hardly mere preparatory work for some later philosophical project. Indeed, Behemoth was presented in dialogue form, something it has in common with polemical philosophical works such as Dialogus Physicus, with interlocutor A of Behemoth sometimes seeming to recount Hobbes’s view and others times B (see Hobbes 2010, 20ff). Concerning how the civil war came about, Hobbes tells Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, that the first dialogue “contains the seed” of it and the second shows the “growth” (2010, 106), and at the outset of that dialogue, we find interlocutor B imploring to be enlightened with A’s vantage point of the civil war: “…I pray you set me (that could not then see so well) vpon the same mountaine by the relation of the actions you then saw, and of their causes, pretensions, iustice, order, artifice, and euent” (Hobbes 2010, 107). Hobbes’s other historical works likewise serve different polemical and rhetorical ends than mere preparatory work for philosophy and often interweave causal claims as he attempts to show not just that some event had happened but also tries to explain why it did.7
A clear reason to treat Hobbes as a philosopher relates to his choice to name his trilogy the Elements of Philosophy, which he published in three sections: De corpore (1655), De homine (1658), and De cive (1642). Although the Leviathan (1651; 1668) has received significantly more attention, scholarly and otherwise, than these works, Hobbes devoted a great deal of time and attention to the Elements trilogy over the course of his writing career. We can infer, for example, that he was composing material related to the early chapters of De corpore in the 1630s and 1640s because there are extant notes on related topics from Payne and Cavendish.8 Indeed, Hobbes recounts for the reader of De cive that events beyond his control caused him to publish that work before publishing De corpore, his work concerning topics in method, first philosophy, geometry, and natural philosophy: “it happened that my country, some years before the civil war broke out, was already seething with questions of the right of Government and of the due obedience of citizens, forerunners of the approaching war” (Hobbes 1998, 13). Due to this civil unrest, Hobbes notes that he “put the rest aside and hurried on the completion” of De cive.
Another reason for examining Hobbes as a philosopher relates to the way in which he claims the parts of his thought depend upon one another. Although many philosophers today often specialize in one area or another of philosophy, Hobbes attempts, like others in his period and in the period preceding him, to offer a philosophical system with connecting points between metaphysics (first philosophy), epistemology, mathematics, natural philosophy, morality, and civil philosophy, among other areas. As has already been mentioned, this interconnectedness often led his critics to attempt to undermine central areas of his philosophy, such as his materialist metaphysics and natural philosophy, because they saw the consequences of his views in other areas as unacceptable. The remainder of this introductory chapter will consider how Hobbes presented his philosophy through his major works. Next it will discuss how A Companion to Hobbes has been organized in light of that presentation. Finally, the chapter will briefly outline strategies that try to make sense of how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophy depend upon one another.
1 The Presentation of Hobbes’s Major Writings
Broadly speaking, Hobbes’s major works follow roughly the same manner of presentation, from his early work Elements of Law (1640)9 through the two editions of Leviathan (1651 and 1668) and to the works in the trilogy Elements of Philosophy that were published between 1642 and 1658. There are many differences among these works, as some of the chapters in the present volume expose, but an overarching division in common in these writings is between what Hobbes calls natural bodies (“Bodies Naturall”) and political bodies (“Politique Bodies”) in the well-known Table provided in the English edition of Leviathan chapter 9 (2012, 130; the Table is between 1651, 40–1).10