Thomas Hobbes (1)

Born in 1588, from a clergyman in Westport, Hobbes was a student at the University of Oxford, which he left in 1608 to be the tutor of the son of W. Cavendish (Lord Devonshire); Thomas Hobbes accompanied his student to France and Italy (1608-1610), and he remained with him until 1679, the date of his death. From this period, we have of him only a translation of Thucydides, of which he would later say in his autobiography in verse:

”Is democratia ostendit mibi quant sit inepta.”

A second stay in France lasted from 1629 to 1631; it was only around this time that he became acquainted with Euclid’s Elements, which would henceforth be for him the model of the method. It was during a third trip to the continent, from 1634 to 1637, that he frequented Mersenne and all the scholars around him in Paris; he visited Galileo in Florence. In 1640, he composed The Elements of Law, the first form of his philosophical and political system, a work of which two fragments (under the name of Human Nature and De Corpore Politico) appeared in 1650 without his consent as two independent works, and which was not known in its entirety until 1889.

In 1640, believing himself threatened because of his royalist convictions, he fled to France, where he resided until the restoration of Charles II in 1651; he published De Cive in Paris in 1642 and Leviathan in 1650. The twenty-eight years he had left to live in England were filled with polemics with theologians, with scholars, with politicians: with the Arminian bishop Bramhall, against whom he supported determinism; with the mathematician Wallis, who mercilessly examined in VElenchus geometriae hobbianae (1655) the mathematical errors of De Corpore, published the same year; with the physicist Robert Boyle, a member of the Royal Society, whose entry he had been refused because of his lack of taste for experiment; with Chancellor Hyde and several bishops who accused him of atheism and heresy “for having made the Church dependent,” he said in exonerating himself, “on royal authority.” He died in 1679.

Hobbes thus describes the state of his philosophical researches, at the time he published De Cive (1642): “I had already gradually advanced my work until I divided it into three sections: in the first of which I treated of the body and its properties in general; in the second I stopped at a particular consideration of man, his faculties and his affections; and in the last, civil society and the duties of those who compose it served as material for my reasonings. So that the first part included what is called the first philosophy and some elements of physics: I tried to discover there the reasons of time, place, causes, proportions, quantity, figure and movement. In the second, I occupied myself with considering imagination, memory, reasoning, appetite, will, good, evil, honest, dishonest, and others of that sort. De Corpore, De Homine, De Cive, such are the titles of these three sections. But this plan does not indicate at all the manner in which Hobbes’s thought had actually been formed. He had no idea of ​​a systematic exposition of his philosophy when he composed, in 1640, The Elements of Law: Natural and Politic: in this political writing, which has the same content as De Cive, he does not refer at all to two earlier parts of his philosophy. Finally, although he began to conceive and execute his overall plan after 1640, political circumstances led him to publish De Cive in 1644, well before the first two parts, De Corpore, published in 1655, and a De Homine, which was in any case very incomplete, in 1658. And he makes no secret, in his preface to De Cive, that “there was no danger in this reversal of the order, because he clearly saw that this part, relying on its own principles, well known by experience, did not need the two preceding ones”.

What is common between his physics and his politics is the same constructive and deductive spirit. In each of these two areas, Hobbes begins by precisely defining the terms or notions that he is going to use: all the effects must then be explained by simple reasoning. “Philosophy is the knowledge, acquired by correct reasoning (per rectam ratiocinationem), of the effects or phenomena according to the causes or generations that one conceives, and, conversely, of their possible generations according to the known effects.” (1).

(1) William Molesworth, Th. Hobbes opera philosophica quae latine scripsit omnia, 5 vol. * The englisk Works, 11 vol., London, 1839-1845; b. I, p. 2.

Source: Émile Bréhier(1951). Histoire de la philosophie, Presses Universitaires de France. Translation and adaptation by © 2024 Nicolae Sfetcu