1657 letter from François du Verdus to Hobbes where he takes the Table as a reason to encourage Hobbes to publish more in the various subjects listed on it and not as providing insight into the structure of Hobbes’s philosophy: “I was recently reading your ‘Table of the several subjects of knowledge’ in your Leviathan: wouldn’t you like to give us this entire body of philosophy? If you gave us an outline plan of treatises on architecture, navigation, optics” (Hobbes 1994b, 471–2).
12 12 Parkin (2007) treats the reception of Hobbes’s civil philosophy and views on religion in England from 1640–1700. See also Mintz (1962).
13 13 Hobbes’s claims in De corpore VI are discussed in Hattab (Chapter 1, this volume) and Adams (Chapter 4, this volume).
14 14 Though see Tarlton (1998) for criticism of Taylor, arguing that there is no single coherent “Taylor thesis,” and of the reception of Taylor’s thesis by scholars.
15 15 This introduction primarily concerns strategies for how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophy fit together, not as much the content within those parts. There has been significant disagreement concerning the Taylor–Warrender debate, and to discuss it more would go beyond what is possible in this space. More recently, Martinich (1992, 71ff) argues for a divine command approach, but Martinich also incorporates conduciveness to self-preservation as necessary to determining whether an action is moral. See also Byron (2015). Green (Chapter 10, this volume) argues that Hobbes does need to incorporate claims about divine command to undergird the moral claims he seeks to provide.
16 16 Although for different reasons, Kavka (1986) also views Hobbes’s civil philosophy as independent from other parts of his philosophy. Kavka argues that Hobbes claimed to have provided a deductive system but failed to do so, stating that “[i]t was only by conflating logical deduction and causal reasoning that Hobbes could have dreamed of a purely deductive politics derived solely from definitions and the principle of motion” (1986, 8). Beyond issues of method, Kavka furthermore asserts that “Hobbesian political theory need not be committed to materialism, mechanism, or even determinism; it can remain neutral with respect to these ontological and metaphysical positions” (1986, 11).
17 17 For example, see De corpore XXIV.9 (EW I.386) for the difference between geometry (De corpore Part III) and natural philosophy (De corpore Part IV).
18 18 For a similar point, see Malcolm (2002, 147). This is related to, but is more general than, Peters’s (1956, 171) objection that premises in psychology or natural philosophy contain only descriptions and therefore no prescriptions can be derived from them.
19 19 Hobbes countenances this ability to “consider as” in many contexts throughout his philosophy. He famously describes the laws of nature by saying that “if we consider the same Theoremes, as delivered in the word of God, that by right commandeth all things; then they are properly called Lawes” (Hobbes 2012, 242; 1651, 80), and he likewise defines ‘person’ using “consider as”: “A PERSON, is he, whose words and actions are considered, either as his own, or as representing the words or actions of an other man, or of any other thing to whom they are attributed, whether Truly or by Fiction. When they are considered as his owne, then is he called a Naturall Person: And when they are considered as representing the words and action of another, then is he a Feigned or Artificiall Person” (Hobbes 2012, 244; 1651, 80). He also uses this device in mathematics, e.g., a line is a “body considered without its breadth” (EW VII.20), and in natural philosophy. In the latter, for example, if interested only in the annual path of the Earth, we “consider” it as if it were a single point (OL I.98–9), but if interested in the Earth’s diurnal motion, we consider it as a body moving with a “simple circular motion” such that all its points describe the circle that the body makes (OL IV.252). I link “consider as” to Hobbes’s account of humans’ natural state in Adams (2019b, 12–13).
20 20 Jesseph (2016) explores the roles played by endeavor in different parts of Hobbes’s philosophy.
1 Hobbes’s Unified Method for Scientia
HELEN HATTAB
Hobbes locates the study of humans within the natural world. Not just our physical actions, but our passions, our desires, our willings and to a certain extent, our thoughts and deliberations, are determined by the same natural laws as everything else. To the degree that there is human freedom, it cannot involve actions that lie outside the deterministic course of nature. Hobbes was decried as a radical thinker in his day and is still considered a materialist atheist. A major source of resistance to his philosophy stemmed from the implications of his theory of human nature for the foundations of ethics and politics. How can we be held to moral laws without a personal divinity to hand these down, punish, and reward us, and without free will to overcome the animal drives nature determines in us? How can we secure political authority and stability if the right to govern does not derive from a providential God? Hobbes has an ingenious solution to this problem which is well-studied. If you know anything about Hobbes, you probably know that he was an early proponent of the social contract theory of government. On this theory, political authority derives from the voluntary transfer of the power each person has, by natural law, to preserve and protect his or her life to a commonly recognized sovereign. Hobbes’s political theory influenced Benedict de Spinoza, John Locke, and beyond, and his contribution to politics is well researched. Less well-studied is the relationship between Hobbes’s view of natural science and his political theory. A major source of confusion lies in his formal presentation of his philosophical and scientific method. Though Hobbes claims that it generates both types of knowledge, his works on physics and politics seem to employ different methods. This chapter examines the role and nature of Hobbes’s method for science in its historical context to clarify how his theoretical and practical philosophy are unified.
1.1 Method, Science, and Hobbes’s Project
Hobbes’s politics is commonly studied independently of his method and science. This is odd because, despite writing political works that can be read independently, Hobbes claims in the preface to his comprehensive work, Elements of Philosophy (EW I.viii-xi) to be the first to develop a scientia civilis (civil science), boasting that by securing true foundations, he has done the same for moral and political philosophy as Galileo Galilei did for physics and William Harvey for medicine. In the previously published preface to De cive (EW II.x-xi), Hobbes traces the source of all contention and bloodshed to the absence of a scientific foundation for morals among predecessors, a point he repeats in De corpore, Part I of his Elements: “therefore, from the not knowing of civil duties, that is from the want of moral science, proceed civil wars, and the greatest calamities of mankind” (EW I.10). To illustrate the source of prior philosophers’ failure to provide this foundation, Hobbes likens the traditional justification of political authority by appeal to the divine to the ancient fable in which Ixion, a mortal, embraces the goddess Juno (EW II.xiii). His point is that past philosophical attempts to marry human judgments and apprehensions about justice to the divine are illusory. This approach can only beget empty, inconsistent opinions that produce political instability