In this chapter, I have argued that Hobbes’s philosophical method is integral to his project of separating philosophy and religion so as to put morals on a true scientific foundation. I have clarified what Hobbes means by “science,” “method,” and “demonstration,” showing that the common attribution of a mechanistic method of resolution to Hobbes is incorrect. Building on recent views regarding whether Hobbes has a unified method for theoretical and practical philosophy I add to available interpretations by drawing on Hobbes’s context. Like contemporaneous methods, Hobbes’s method comprises a universal and a particular method. This distinction sheds light on how analysis and synthesis function in each branch of Hobbes’s method in a way that serves to unify and place both theoretical and practical philosophy on a scientific basis.
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Notes
1 1 Hobbes exhorts those with a sincere desire to be philosophers to “let your reason move upon the deep of your own cogitations and experience; those things that lie in confusion must be set asunder, distinguished, and every one stamped with its own name set in order; that is to say your method must resemble that of the creation. The order of the creation was, light, distinction of day and night, the firmament, the luminaries, sensible creatures, man; and after the creation, the commandment. Therefore, the order of contemplation will be, reason, definition, space, the stars, sensible quality, man; and after man is grown up, subjection to command” (EW I. xiii). Hobbes echoes the appeal to two parallel, but separate, sources of insight into truth prevalent in seventeenth-century Calvinist Scholastic textbooks and Francis Bacon’s work: the book of nature and Holy Scripture. Schmidt-Biggemann explains that for seventeenth-century Calvinist Scholastics, “Knowledge was understood as an inventory of the Revelation made available to humankind, as knowledge found in the Bible, History, and Nature. These three ‘books’ were the field of experience which according to God’s creation plan is inventoried in knowledge” (Schmidt-Biggemann 2001, 394; translation mine).
2 2 Meteorology, Optics, and Music were all mixed mathematical sciences in the Scholastic tradition; logic was considered the instrument of philosophy, not part of natural philosophy proper.
3 3 See Hattab (2009, 93–8).
4 4 Hobbes’s division most resembles that of early seventeenth-century Calvinist Scholastic textbooks in which “The framework of metaphysics was theological, not the other way around. Hence one counted metaphysical concepts within natural theology and in this way, natural philosophy and metaphysics were made broadly coextensive” (Schmidt-Biggemann 2001, 394, translation mine). For Hobbes, likewise, topics of traditional Aristotelian metaphysics, like