philosophy with geometrical procedures, they cannot account for a moral science in Hobbes’s sense. 2a) also excludes physics from science. 2b) holds that Hobbes maintains the possibility of scientifically deducing a consistent body of theoretical and practical knowledge from first principles but includes alternative starting points and methods for non-philosophers to gain knowledge of practical philosophy.17 This too is promising, but to the extent that there is one method, it is an ideal that does no work. In practice, Hobbes proceeds as though physics and politics are independent domains with their own methods.
Despite these problems, 2) is better supported than 1). Hobbes’s view of scientific knowledge and generic definition of method point to one type of cognitive activity that constitutes scientific knowledge of all philosophical subjects. Regardless of whether one studies natural or artificial bodies, starts from cognitions of causes or effects, formal definitions or true cognitions attained by introspection, the process of methodical computation that charts the shortest route between causes and effects should be identical. This fits Hobbes’s aim of inaugurating a civil science to exorcise the Scholastic philosophy Empusa. Absent a unity of method for science, the boundaries between practical philosophy and religion will blur as non-scientific forms of cognition can then be invoked to confuse the rights and duties of subjects. Hobbes’s approach to identifying and removing the source of civil strife then falls apart. Hence overall 2) is the correct approach. I now draw on Hobbes’s context to propose a third variation, 2c).
Key is recognizing that Hobbes’s generic definition of method is just that. He next distinguishes method into what his contemporaries call universal method versus a method of proof for solving particular problems, known as particular method. Universal method was typically a preliminary hierarchical ordering of the concepts and definitions required for the discovery or teaching of knowledge of a subject, or both. It is distinct from method as a set of rules for scientific proofs, as found in Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics.18 Nonetheless, the two methods go hand in hand since universal method provides the systematic framework within which one generates different kinds of proofs by the particular method. This provides a third kind of unity for all scientific knowledge, rooted in method, with universal method providing a hierarchically ordered set of principles and definitions one requires as starting points for the deductive arguments one then makes in different domains to answer particular questions. Interpretation, 2c), allows for one computational activity that unifies all the sciences: namely, the rules of syllogistic reasoning for making valid propter quid demonstrations once one has the true principles, and applies the relevant definitions to the problem at hand. But to avoid willy-nilly attempts at deduction from any definitions, Hobbes’s method includes a preliminary methodical resolution of ideas and orderly composition into definitions, starting from the simplest concepts of geometry. This ensures unity at the level of first principles and the definitions one is permitted to take as starting points for scientific demonstrations at each level of inquiry. 2c) has been overlooked because just as Hobbes uses “demonstration” equivocally, he characterizes both activities as “computation” and labels methodical procedures that make up both the ordering computation and the syllogizing computation as analysis and synthesis.19 The two branches of method have thus been confused for one. I now disentangle them.
1.3 Analyses and Syntheses Reinterpreted in Context
The bifurcation of philosophical method into a universal ordering of subject matter and a particular method of demonstration was commonplace in the logic textbooks of Hobbes’s intellectual context (Hattab 2014). Hobbes makes a similar distinction: “Philosophers either seek scientific knowledge [Scientia] simpliciter or indefinitely, that is, having posed no certain question, they [seek to] scientifically know as much as they can …” (Hobbes 1999, 59; OL I.60) in which case they employ a method that is strictly resolutive and analytical to arrive at universal notions compoundable by synthesis into definitions; or they seek to scientifically know
the cause of some certain phenomena, or to at least discover something certain, such as whatever would be the cause of light, heat, heaviness, a proposed shape, and similar things; or in which subject a certain proposed accident would inhere, or for the purpose of a certain effect which is proposed to be generated from many accidents, which [ones] would conduce most powerfully towards it; or in which manner for the producing of a certain effect, the proposed particular causes ought to be conjoined. On account of this variety of things sought, sometimes the Analytic method, sometimes the Synthetic, and sometimes both is to be summoned.
(Hobbes 1999, 59; OL I.60–1)
Method aimed at unqualified knowledge uses resolution/analysis and composition/synthesis in the Scholastic sense to holistically know as much as possible about body. Here computation is conceptual ordering, which Scholastic contemporaries distinguish into “analysis” and “synthesis.” Hobbes next turns to the method for answering specific questions about the causes and inherence of particular accidents of body, which may be analytic, synthetic or both, depending on the inquiry. But here he uses the Scholastic terms pertaining to the ordering method for another set of operations, including syllogistic deductions. The second branch of his method gives Hobbes the flexibility to tailor the procedure for the shortest route between causes/explanations and effects/consequences to the context of inquiry. But Hobbes misleadingly uses “analysis” versus “synthesis” plus their derivatives to label procedures that take distinct forms in the particular method. I will thus refer to its operations as analysis2 and synthesis2.20
At root, analysis and synthesis, the basic operations of philosophical reckoning, are for Hobbes akin to mathematical subtraction and addition, respectively. Recall that he separates scientific knowledge from experience. Experience consists in sensing or remembering that there is something but cannot yield a causal explanation of it. Hobbes’s example is that I see something approaching me and as it gets closer my senses detect a certain shape and motion. All I know by experiential cognition is that this thing exists; I don’t know what it is and what its causes are. For that I require computation, which begins with something like subtraction, the mental operation of resolution or analysis. As when we subtract one number from another, analysis in the universal method separates out distinct features from the individual nature that encompasses them to arrive at the simple components of things – the elements. This happens in stages. As a person approaches me, I first separate out body from my perception of the individual, then the property of being animated, and finally rational, in the order of most universal to least21 (EW I.4). For Hobbes these elements are not physical parts of a thing – resolution is not the mechanistic reduction of a watch or automaton into its component parts (EW I.67). Nor need the elements be linguistic entities, since we can ratiocinate without words (EW I.14). Analysis is a step by step conceptual separating out of general features, contained in an individual concept, from the concept as a whole (EW I.4–5).22
Hobbes later gives two examples to illustrate the strictly analytical method that yields the universal notions we need to attain unqualified knowledge of things. Both begin with an idea, from experience, as when we see something approaching, but now resolved from less general to more:
1 My idea of this square is resolved or analyzed into “plain, terminated with a certain number of equal and straight lines and right angles.” I can then resolve or analyze these concepts further into the properties common to all material objects: “line,” “plane,” “angle,” “straightness.”
2 My conception of gold is resolved into ideas of “solid,” “visible,” “heavy,” I can then further resolve or analyze these ideas into successively more general ones, like “extension” and “corporeity” until I arrive at the most general one: motion.
Once you have analyzed down to the most general, also the simplest, conceptual elements of your ideas you will have the causes of individual concepts of a square and gold. Hobbes’s use of the term “cause” suggests that the resolution of gold is a mechanistic reduction into the physical parts of gold. For how can concepts cause our ideas? However, Hobbes uses “cause” in the Aristotelian sense of one or more explanatory factors, since he also claims that