target="_blank" rel="nofollow" href="#ulink_9a15b1e1-7078-5a23-a416-df5dc45672d0">16 Adams advances 2a) in combination with a looser structural unity than strict deductivism.
17 17 Sorell advocates 2b) arguing for “the autonomy thesis” (Sorell 1999, 7–13). Adams agrees that Hobbes is not committed to the idea that, for every context of inquiry, the same foundational principles constitute the absolute starting points for a hierarchically ordered series of deductions in each branch of philosophy: “if we understand Hobbes as holding that the simples for a science are determined by our explanatory needs – a materialism that does not privilege a single level for explanations – then we can understand why Hobbes grounds civil relations in human bodies apart from civil relations” (Adams 2019, 20). However, Adams also advocates 2a) arguing that the simple conceptions at the foundation of first philosophy and civil science are attained by a common method of thought experiments following fixed steps (Adams 2019, 19).
18 18 For example, Zabarella’s seminal writings on logic divide method, taken broadly, into order and method properly speaking. The task of method in the proper sense is to lead us from a known thing to knowledge of another, unknown thing, as when we are led from substantial change to knowledge of prime matter or, from eternal motion to knowledge of an eternal unmoved mover. By contrast, method as order does not cause us to infer one thing from another, but rather arranges (disponere) the things to be treated, as when the order of teaching demands that we first discuss the heavens and then the elements. It arranges the parts of a discipline. Order takes precedence because one must divide a discipline into parts, before one can articulate the method that will lead us from the known to the unknown that is sought within each part (Zabarella 1597, Vol. I, 139). Scholastic Protestant philosophers, known as systematics, took up Zabarella’s teachings to develop a middle path between Aristotelian and Ramist systems of logic. Bartholomaeus Keckermann and Franco Burgersdijk wrote logic texts in this tradition that were influential in England at the time Hobbes wrote the first part of De corpore. They make the same distinction between universal and particular method as Zabarella (Burgersdijk 1626, 380; Keckermann 1613, 578–9). Burgersdijk, like Hobbes, claims that the order of discovery is the same as the order of teaching (Burgersdijk 1626, 380–1).
19 19 Sorell notes of analysis and synthesis “Neither method trades on specialized knowledge” and describes what Hobbes does in Elements of Law and Leviathan as follows: “One way in which the doctrine is supposed to improve on what we know already, is by imposing an order on it. From a mass of moral lore, common sense psychology, rudimentary information about law and the average citizen’s knowledge of which people in the state hold offices of authority, Hobbes purports to sift out what is basic and what is not, what has to be known before other things are known … Relations of dependence are thus revealed between truths that might otherwise seem on the level” (Sorell 1999, 11). He then adds: “But deductive or demonstrative order is not the whole story” (Sorell 1999, 12). Sorell recognizes that the purpose of analysis and synthesis is to order knowledge but reconstructs the rest of the story differently than I do. Adams likewise identifies two different levels at which Hobbes unifies sciences but takes as central a method of construction that enables the explanations one finds in the mixed mathematical sciences (Adams 2014, 7).
20 20 A third sense of analysis and synthesis found in logistica, Hobbes’s geometrical method, lies outside the scope of philosophical method. William Sacksteder and Richard Talaska concur that, for Hobbes, analysis and synthesis do not function, in philosophy, as they do in geometry. Philosophical propositions arrived at, through analysis, are not, as in geometry, convertible in the corresponding synthesis (Sacksteder 1980, 131–46; 1988, 643–7; Talaska 1988, 207–37).
21 21 Keckermann and Burgersdijk likewise take the natural order to be one where what is most universal is both prior by nature and prior to us (Burgersdijk 1626, 380; Keckermann 1613, 582–3).
22 22 As Adams (2019) shows, one may have to employ thought experiments to get at the most universal features of all.
23 23 It is odd that Hobbes speaks of “universal notions” and “pictures” since universals appear to be neither real things nor abstract general ideas. He writes, “when a living creature, a stone, a spirit, or any other thing is said to be universal, it is not to be understood that any man, stone, & c. ever was or can be universal, but only that these words, living creature, stone, & c. are universal names, that is, names common to many things; and the conceptions answering them in our mind, are the images and phantasms of several living creatures or other things” (EW I.20). Such universal notions or pictures could consist in several particular ideas that we link to each other and to an abstract name.
24 24 Hobbes seems to assume that our universal notions mirror the underlying faculties of real things. He shares this assumption with the Portuguese Jesuit philosopher, Pedro da Fonseca, and early seventeenth-century German Scholastics influenced by Fonseca’s metaphysics. Walter Sparn observes of the latter, “Their approach assumes ontologically that subtilitas [acuteness/mental penetration] is suited to experienced things, i.e., there is kinship and internal reference to God, both among things and in relation to the human intellect, by virtue of which they [things] exist in it [the human intellect] as especially representable and abstractable into general concepts. In this manner, the first principles of their knowledge can be drawn from the proportional being of things” (Sparn 2001, 481, translation mine).
25 25 Notably, Hobbes claims that in moral science, instead of proceeding from the definitions of human will and passions obtained in physics, we can directly resolve our conception of an unjust action into “fact against law” and the notion of law into “the command of him or them that have coercive power” (EW I.74). Power will be further resolvable into the wills and passions of humans constituting the power, but these can be cognized by experience rather than demonstrated from the principles of physics. Hobbes also uses thought experiments to get clear on basic concepts, like space, possibly because simples are not resolvable. Adams draws an interesting parallel between the annihilation thought experiment in De corpore and the state of nature device to reveal the concept of equality (Adams 2019, 9–11).
26 26 It is, admittedly, less clear how one would deduce natural laws using this particular method. This requires more research.
27 27 Nor is analysis2 a resolution into universal notions since a medium and sentient body are both more specific than matter in general. However, it loosely resembles strict analysis in that it distinguishes something complex into parts.
2 The Stoic Roots of Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy and First Philosophy
GEOFFREY GORHAM
While Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy and First Philosophy are indebted to many sources, including fellow travelers (like Bacon and Galileo), late Aristotelians (like Zabarella and the Coimbra Commentators), and the Greeks themselves (like Aristotle and the Epicureans), the Stoic influence is not yet fully clear. To be sure, the impact of Classical and Renaissance Stoicism and Epicureanism upon Hobbes’s political philosophy has been well documented (Springborg 2010; Tuck 1983). But the Stoic roots of his science and metaphysics have not been so thoroughly investigated. This imbalance is especially worth correcting since the Stoics and Hobbes both aimed to unify all the branches of knowledge. And as