A Companion to Hobbes E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Blackwell Companions to Philosophy
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 1388

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Offers comprehensive treatment of Thomas Hobbes’s thought, providing readers with different ways of understanding Hobbes as a systematic philosopher  

As one of the founders of modern political philosophy, Thomas Hobbes is best known for his ideas regarding the nature of legitimate government and the necessity of society submitting to the absolute authority of sovereign power. Yet Hobbes produced a wide range of writings, from translations of texts by Homer and Thucydides, to interpretations of Biblical books, to works devoted to geometry, optics, morality, and religion. Hobbes viewed himself as presenting a unified method for theoretical and practical science—an interconnected system of philosophy that provides many entry points into his thought. 

A Companion to Hobbes is an expertly curated collection of essays offering close textual engagement with the thought of Thomas Hobbes in his major works while probing his ideas regarding natural philosophy, mathematics, human nature, civil philosophy, religion, and more. The Companion discusses the ways in which scholars have tried to understand the unity and diversity of Hobbes’s philosophical system and examines the reception of the different parts of Hobbes’s philosophy by thinkers such as René Descartes, Margaret Cavendish, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. Presenting a diversity of fresh perspectives by both emerging and established scholars, this volume:  

• Provides a comprehensive treatment of Hobbes’s thought in his works, including Elements of Law, Elements of Philosophy, and Leviathan 
• Explores the connecting points between Hobbes’ metaphysics, epistemology, mathematics, natural philosophy, morality, and civil philosophy 
• Offers readers strategies for understanding how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophical system fit together 
• Examines Hobbes’s philosophy of mathematics and his attempts to understand geometrical objects and definitions 
• Considers Hobbes’s philosophy in contexts such as the natural state of humans, gender relations, and materialist worldviews 
• Challenges conceptions of Hobbes’s moral theory and his views about the rights of sovereigns 

Part of the acclaimed Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series, A Companion to Hobbes is an invaluable resource for scholars and advanced students of Early modern thought, particularly those from disciplines such as History of Philosophy, Political Philosophy, Intellectual History, History of Politics, Political Theory, and English. 

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A Companion to Hobbes

Edited by

Marcus P. Adams

This edition first published 2021

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Table of Contents

Cover

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

Title Page

Copyright

Notes on Contributors

Introduction: The Presentation and Structure of Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy

Abbreviations for Citations to Hobbes’s Works

Part I: First Philosophy, Mathematics, and Natural Philosophy

Chapter 1: Hobbes’s Unified Method for

Scientia

Chapter 2: The Stoic Roots of Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy and First Philosophy

Chapter 3: Hobbesian Mathematics and the Dispute with Wallis

Chapter 4: Explanations in Hobbes’s Optics and Natural Philosophy

Part II: Human Nature and Morality

Chapter 5: “A Most Useful Economy”: Hobbes on Linguistic Meaning and Understanding

Chapter 6: Hobbes’s Theory of the Good: Felicity by Anticipatory Pleasure

Chapter 7: In search of “A Constant Civill Amity”: Hobbes on Friendship and Sociability

Chapter 8: Hobbes on Power and Gender Relations

Chapter 9: The State of Nature as a Continuum Concept

Chapter 10: Hobbes’s Minimalist Moral Theory

Part III: Civil Philosophy

Chapter 11: Hobbesian Persons and Representation

Chapter 12: Hobbes’s Account of Authorizing a Sovereign

Chapter 13: The Strength and Significance of Subjects’ Rights in

Leviathan

Chapter 14: Hobbes on Sovereignty and Its Strains

Chapter 15: Hobbes on International Ethics

Part IV: Religion

Chapter 16: Against Philosophical Darkness: A Political Conception of Enlightenment

Chapter 17: Hobbes on Submission to God

Chapter 18: Thomas Hobbes and the Christian Commonwealth

Chapter 19: Hobbes and Toleration

Chapter 20: Hobbes, Rome’s Enemy

Chapter 21: Hobbes and the Papal Monarchy

Part V: Controversies and Reception

Chapter 22: Body and Space in Hobbes and Descartes

Chapter 23: Hobbes’s Mechanical Philosophy and Its English Critics

Chapter 24: Cudworth as a Critic of Hobbes

Chapter 25: Cavendish and Hobbes on Causation

Chapter 26: Striving, Happiness, and the Good: Spinoza as Follower and Critic of Hobbes

Chapter 27: Hobbes and Astell on War and Peace

Chapter 28: Hobbes and Hume on Human Nature: “Much of a Dispute of Words?”

Chapter 29: He Shows “Genius” and Is “More Useful than Pufendorf”: Kant’s Reception of Hobbes

Chapter 30: Catharine Macaulay and the Reception of Hobbes During the Eighteenth Century

Index

End User License Agreement

List of Illustrations

Chapter 0

Figure I.1 The order of presentation in Hobbes’s Philosophy: The Table of

Leviathan

9 compared to the

Elements of Philosophy

trilogy.

Chapter 3

Figure 3.1 Cavalieri’s indivisibles.

Chapter 4

Figure 4.1 Hierarchy of the parts of philosophy.

Figure 4.2 Orders of knowing to arrive at civil philosophy.

Figure 4.3 Diagram from

De homine

II.

Chapter 9

Figure 9.1 Continuum of permissible private judgment.

Figure 9.2 Scope for effective personal agency mapped onto the continuum of permissible private judgment.

Chapter 12

Figure 12.1 The one-step third-party beneficiary account.

Figure 12.2 The two-step account.

Guide

Cover

Blackwell Companions to Philosophy

Title Page

Copyright

Table of Contents

Notes on Contributors

Begin Reading

Index

End User License Agreement

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Notes on Contributors

Arash Abizadeh, Professor, Department of Political Science and an Associate Member of the Department of Philosophy at McGill University. His research focusses on democratic theory; power; identity, nationalism, and cosmopolitanism; immigration and border control; and seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophy, particularly Hobbes and Rousseau. His monograph Hobbes and the Two Faces of Ethics (Cambridge) won the 2019 Canadian Philosophical Association Biennial Book Prize (English).

Marcus P. Adams, Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany and former Associate Editor of the journal Hobbes Studies. His research focuses on perception and natural philosophy in Early Modern Philosophy, in particular on Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish. His recent papers have appeared in journals such as British Journal for the History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, Philosophers’ Imprint, and Philosophical Studies.

Mónica Brito Vieira, Professor, University of York. Her work in political theory focuses on the languages and concepts through which we make sense of and shape our political world, most notably the concept of political representation. She is the author of The Elements of Representation in Hobbes (Brill, 2009), the coauthor of Representation (Polity, 2008), and editor of Reclaiming Representation (Routledge, 2017). Her work has also appeared in the American Political Science Review, Journal of the History of Ideas, History of Political Thought, Thesis Eleven, Constellations, Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, and other journals.

Jacqueline Broad, Associate Professor of Philosophy, School of Philosophical, Historical, and International Studies at Monash University, Melbourne. Her main area of research is early modern women’s philosophy. She is the author of The Philosophy of Mary Astell: An Early Modern Theory of Virtue (Oxford University Press, 2015), A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700 (with Karen Green, Cambridge University Press, 2009), and Women Philosophers of the Seventeenth Century (Cambridge University Press, 2002). She is currently the Series Editor for Cambridge University Press’s new Elements series on Women in the History of Philosophy.

Michael Byron, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Kent State University in Kent, Ohio, where he has held an appointment since 1997. He is the author of Submission and Subjection in Leviathan (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), and the editor of Satisficing and Maximizing: Moral Theorists on Practical Reason (Cambridge University Press, 2004). He has published journal articles on ethical theory and theory of rationality. During 2004–5, he was Visiting Fulbright Scholar in Philosophy at Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Alexandra Chadwick, postdoctoral researcher, University of Jyväskylä and a lecturer at Leiden University College. She is Associate Editor of the journal Hobbes Studies. Her chapter in this collection was written while she was a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Groningen. Her research has focused on Hobbes’s materialist psychology and its implications for his practical philosophy, and she is currently working on the psychology of sociability in the period between Hobbes and Hume. She received her doctorate in 2017 from Queen Mary, University of London, and from 2016-17 was a Max Weber Fellow at the European University Institute.

Jeffrey Collins, Associate Professor of History, Queen’s University, Ontario. A historian of Anglophone political and religious thought, he has authored many articles and chapters on the political, religious, and intellectual history of Britain during the era of the Civil Wars and Restoration. He has written two books: TheAllegiance of Thomas Hobbes (Oxford, 2005), and In the Shadow of Leviathan: John Locke and the Politics of Conscience (Cambridge, 2020). He is currently an editor of the Journal of British Studies and is a regular book reviewer in the Wall Street Journal and the Times Literary Supplement.

Eleanor Curran, Senior Lecturer in Legal Philosophy, Kent Law School, University of Kent at Canterbury. Publications include Reclaiming the Rights of the Hobbesian Subject (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), “Hobbesian Sovereignty and the Rights of Subjects: Absolutism Undermined?,” Hobbes Studies 32 (2019), “An Immodest Proposal: Hobbes Rather than Locke Provides a Forerunner for Modern Rights Theory,” Law and Philosophy (2012), “Hobbes on Equality: Context, Rhetoric, Argument” Hobbes Studies 25 (2012), and “Blinded by the Light of Hohfeld: Hobbes’s Notion of Liberty” Jurisprudence (2010).

Stewart Duncan, Associate Professor of Philosophy, University of Florida. He is the author of several articles on Hobbes, Leibniz, and other seventeenth-century philosophers, and is currently working on a book on the history of materialism from Hobbes to Locke.

Sandra Leonie Field, Assistant Professor of Humanities (Philosophy), Yale-NUS College, Singapore. She is the author of Potentia: Hobbes and Spinoza on Power and Popular Politics (Oxford University Press, 2020). Her research investigates conceptions of political power and their implications for democratic theory; she approaches these themes through engagement with texts in the history of philosophy. She has also written on non-Western political philosophy.

Luc Foisneau, Director of Research, French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS). He also teaches political philosophy at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris. He is the author of Hobbes et la toute-puissance de Dieu (2000) and Hobbes: La vie inquiète (2016). He is the editor of Leviathan after 350 Years (2004, with T. Sorell), of New Critical Perspectives on Hobbes’sLeviathan (2004, with G. Wright), and Dictionnaire des philosophes français du 17e siècle: acteurs et réseaux du savoir (2015).

Geoffrey Gorham, Professor and Chair of Philosophy, Macalester College and Resident Fellow, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science. He is coeditor of The Language of Nature: Reassessing the Mathematization of Natural Philosophy (University of Minnesota, 2016), and author of Philosophy of Science (One World, 2009). Other recent publications include “Locke on Space, Time and God: The Van Limborch Correspondence” (Ergo 2020); “American Immaterialism: Samuel Johnson’s Emendations of George Berkeley” (Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 2018); and “Descartes on the Infinity of Space vs. Time” (In Infinity in Early Modern Philosophy, Brill, 2018).

Karen Green, Professorial Fellow at the University of Melbourne. She is the author of A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1700–1800 (Cambridge University Press, 2014), A History of Women’s Political Thought in Europe, 1400–1700, with Jacqueline Broad (Cambridge University Press 2009), she recently edited The Correspondence of Catharine Macaulay (Oxford University Press, 2019). Her most recent book is Catharine Macaulay’s Republican Enlightenment (Routledge, 2020).

Michael J. Green, Associate Professor of Philosophy, Pomona College. He has published articles on Hobbes’s theories of punishment, authorization, and justice in Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, the Journal of the History of Philosophy, and Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy.

Helen Hattab, Professor of Philosophy, University of Houston, specializing in the history of Western philosophy and science from the late sixteenth to late seventeenth centuries. She is the author of Descartes on Forms and Mechanisms (Cambridge, 2009) and numerous papers tracing the connections between late Scholastic Aristotelian and seventeenth-century debates about causation, form, matter, substance, laws of nature, and scientific demonstration. Her current research focuses on arguments about the metaphysics of universals from late sixteenth-century philosophers to Spinoza, and the methods of analysis and synthesis from Zabarella and Burgersdijk to Hobbes and Spinoza.

John Henry, Professor Emeritus in History of Science, University of Edinburgh, Scotland. He has published widely in the history of science from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century and from atomism to paleontology. He has a particular interest in the major thinkers who contributed to the new mechanical philosophies of the seventeenth century, from Galileo and Descartes, through Hobbes and Robert Boyle, to Isaac Newton. A selection of his articles can be found in his Religion, Magic, and the Origins of Science in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2012).

Douglas Jesseph, Professor of Philosophy, University of South Florida. His research specializes in the history and philosophy of mathematics in the Early Modern period. He is the author of Berkeley’s Philosophy of Mathematics and Squaring the Circle: The War between Hobbes and Wallis, as well as papers on seventeenth-century mathematics and methodology.

Marcy P. Lascano, Professor of Philosophy, University of Kansas. Her research focus is metaphysics in the works of women philosophers, including Margaret Cavendish, Anne Conway, Damaris Masham, Mary Astell, and Emilie du Châtelet. She is coeditor with Eileen O’Neill of Feminist History of Philosophy: The Recovery and Evaluation of Women’s Philosophical Thought, and coeditor with Lisa Shapiro of Early Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources (Broadview, forthcoming). She has recently edited an online edition of Cavendish’s 1663 Philosophical and Physical Opinions and is finishing a book on Margaret Cavendish and Anne Conway.

Franck Lessay, Emeritus Professor, Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris 3 University. He has published Souveraineté et légitimité chez Hobbes (1988), Le débat Locke-Filmer (1998), and Les fondements philosophiques de la tolérance (2002, as coeditor). He is the author of about 100 articles and 30 reviews on various subjects of political theory published in French, English, and Italian journals. He has translated and edited several short treatises of Hobbes.

S. A. Lloyd, Professor of Philosophy and Law, University of Southern California. She writes in the history of political philosophy and contemporary liberal feminism. She is author of Morality in the Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes: Cases in the Law of Nature (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and Ideals as Interests in Hobbes’s Leviathan: The Power of Mind over Matter (Cambridge University Press, 1992); and editor of Interpreting Hobbes’s Political Philosophy (Cambridge University Press, 2019), The Bloomsbury Companion to Hobbes, (Bloomsbury, 2013), and Hobbes Today: Hobbesian Insights for the 21st Century (Cambridge University Press, 2012).

Robert W. McIntyre, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, American University in Cairo. His article “Concerning ‘men’s affections to Godward’: Hobbes on the First and Eternal Cause of All Things” was published in Journal of the History of Philosophy (2016). He is the cofounder of the Middle East Society for Analytic Philosophy.

Johan Olsthoorn, Assistant Professor in Political Theory, University of Amsterdam and a senior postdoctoral fellow of the Research Foundation (FWO)-Flanders at KU Leuven (2018–21). His research on Thomas Hobbes has appeared in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy, European Journal of Political Theory, History of Political Thought, and Journal of Ethics, among other venues. Oxford University Press is set to publish his first monograph Hobbes on Justice.

Rosamond Rhodes, Professor of Medical Education and Director of Bioethics Education, Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai; Professor of Philosophy, The Graduate Center, CUNY; and Professor of Bioethics and Associate Director of the Clarkson-Mount Sinai Bioethics Program. She writes on a broad array of issues, primarily in bioethics. Her new book is The Trusted Doctor: Medical Ethics and Professionalism (Oxford University Press, April 2020). In it, she draws on her view of Leviathan as Hobbes’s construction of ethics for sovereigns, and uses a similar approach in her construction of a distinctive ethics for medicine.

Gabriella Slomp, Reader, University of St. Andrews, Scotland. Former editor of Hobbes Studies, she has published Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory (2000); edited Thomas Hobbes (2007), coedited International Political Theory After Hobbes (2016), and has published numerous articles on Hobbes in international journals.

Edward Slowik, Professor of Philosophy, Winona State University in Winona, Minnesota, and Resident Fellow, Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, University of Minnesota. His primary area of research is the history and philosophy of science and Early Modern philosophy, with special emphasis on the philosophy of space and spacetime.

Johann Sommerville, Emeritus Professor of History, University of Wisconsin, Madison. He is the author of Royalists and Patriots: Politics and Ideology in England, 1603–1640 (Longman, 1999), and Thomas Hobbes: Political Ideas in Historical Context (Macmillan/St. Martin’s, 1992). He is a contributor to The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (1996), The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes’s Leviathan (2007), The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes (2016), and other books on Hobbes. Currently, he is working on an edition of Hobbes’s Elements of Law for the Clarendon series of Hobbes’s works.

Tom Sorell, Professor of Politics and Philosophy, Warwick University. He is the author of Hobbes (Arguments of the Philosophers, Routledge, 1986); Emergencies and Politics: A Sober Hobbesian Approach (Cambridge University Press, 2013). He has edited The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes; Hobbes and History (with G. A. J. Rogers); LeviathanAfter 350 Years (with Luc Foisneau); Leviathan Between the Wars (with Luc Foisneau and J-C. Merle). He has written dozens of articles on Hobbes in edited volumes and peer-reviewed journals, including Philosophical Quarterly, The Monist, Philosophy and Rhetoric, and History of Philosophy Quarterly.

Patricia Springborg, Guest Professor, Centre for British Studies of the Humboldt University in Berlin (since 2013), held a Chair in Political Theory at the University of Sydney (1995–2005), and was Professor Ordinario at the Free University of Bolzano in Italy (2007–13). Her research fields include: 1) Thomas Hobbes: Metaphysics, Ecclesiology; 2) The Concept of Needs in Marxist Thought; 3) Early History of the State East and West; 4) Orientalism; 5) Mary Astell (1666–1731) political writings; and currently, 6) Greek into Arabic and Antiquity Transformation, producing 4 books, 4 edited books, and 80 publications in refereed journals and collections.

Justin Steinberg, Professor of Philosophy, Brooklyn College and the CUNY Graduate Center. He is author of Spinoza’s Political Psychology: The Taming of Fortune and Fear (Cambridge, 2018), coauthor (with Valtteri Viljanen) of Spinoza (Polity, 2020), and coeditor (with Karolina Hübner) of the forthcoming Cambridge Spinoza Lexicon (Cambridge).

Howard Williams, Honorary Distinguished Professor in the School of Law and Politics, Cardiff University and Emeritus Professor of Political Theory, Department of International Politics, Aberystwyth. He is author of Marx; Kant’s Political Philosophy; Concepts of Ideology; Hegel, Heraclitus and Marx’s Dialectic; International Relations in Political Theory; International Relations and the Limits of Political Theory; Kant’s Critique of Hobbes; and Kant and the End of War. He is the coauthor of Francis Fukuyama and the End of History with David Sullivan and G. Matthews. He is a founding editor of the journal Kantian Review and editor of the Philosophy of Immanuel Kant in the Cambridge University Press series Elements.

Introduction: The Presentation and Structure of Thomas Hobbes’s Philosophy

MARCUS P. ADAMS

The shadow of Thomas Hobbes’s ideas stretches across the seventeenth century and continues to present day. His oeuvre ranges from translations of texts by figures such as Homer and Thucydides to the interpretation of Biblical texts, and from works devoted to geometry and optics to civil philosophy and religion. His impact in these and other areas was significant, even if in some cases his views functioned primarily as a foil. In Hobbes’s own time he was reviled as the “monster of Malmesbury” who threatened the Christian religion and failed to appreciate the rise of experimental philosophy. Regarding religion, Abraham Cowley put it succinctly in The True effigies of the monster of Malmesbury, or, Thomas Hobbes in his proper colours (1680) when asserting that “He that will Hobbes Applaud must first Blaspheme.” Similarly, Hobbes received no invitation to join the Royal Society, and he harshly criticized the experimental philosophy as lacking a method when saying “ingenuity is one thing and method [ars] is another. Here method is needed” (Hobbes 1985, 347).1 Given such vitriol, it should be no surprise that the term ‘Hobbist’ was often used pejoratively to identify all that was seen as wrong with and dangerous in Hobbes’s thought.

Many of Hobbes’s contemporaries recognized that these points of pressure on Hobbes’s ideas, as well as others, were not isolated cases; indeed, many saw these problems as symptoms resulting from the overall system of materialist philosophy that Hobbes was advancing. For example, although Hobbes’s extended disputes with John Wallis focused largely on issues in mathematics, Wallis also attacked Hobbes’s metaphysics because of its theological implications.2 Likewise, the wide range of topics in Hobbes’s exchanges with Bishop Bramhall shows the extent to which the worries of Hobbes’s critics were often founded upon Hobbes’s system and not upon what the twentieth-first century reader may, at first glance, see as distinct areas of Hobbes’s thought.3 Hobbes saw himself as offering a system of philosophy with interconnected parts, and his critics frequently attacked it as such.

Given the wide range of Hobbes’s writings, as well as the period of time over which Hobbes was actively writing, revising, and translating his own works, there are many entry points into his thought. For example, one could examine Hobbes by beginning with his early works and tracing the trajectory of his ideas as they developed through differing rhetorical contexts. Such an approach to understanding Hobbes has been greatly aided by some of the excellent resources recently made available to scholars, such as Noel Malcolm’s Clarendon edition of Leviathan (Hobbes 2012), which provides English (1651) and Latin (1668) facing pages of that work, and Deborah Baumgold’s Three-Text Edition of Thomas Hobbes’s Political Theory (Baumgold 2017), which offers side-by-side comparison of passages in Elements of Law, De cive, and Leviathan. Alongside close attention to textual details, this approach might also examine Hobbes’s preceding context and influences as well as his immediate context, such as his correspondence (Hobbes 1994b) or the notes on his works as they were in the process of being written, such as Robert Payne’s on De corpore held in the Chatsworth House Hobbes papers (Chatsworth A10).

Another approach to Hobbes’s ideas could excise key arguments, or parts of those arguments, from his corpus and examine them on their own philosophical merits with less attention to textual minutiae. Such a method would seek to offer something like a rational reconstruction, holding Hobbes subject to requirements such as logical consistency and deductive validity, and in doing so seek to provide the best possible picture of what Hobbes sought to demonstrate. Rather than accusing Hobbes of being misguided, or at times even sloppy in his argumentation, this way of engaging Hobbes might attempt to explain away interpretational difficulties here and there with the aim of constructing a philosophically palatable system. Even if it might depart at times from Hobbes’s own explicit statements, taking such an approach may help bring Hobbes’s philosophy to bear upon pressing present-day issues and potentially offer guidance about moral quandaries.4

The present volume has been organized under the assumption that these two approaches to studying Hobbes, i.e., the textual/philological approach and the philosophical approach, are not mutually exclusive.5 Our attempts at understanding a figure like Hobbes are aided by close textual and philological engagement with the aim of trying to understanding what Hobbes might have been saying. But these efforts can also be helped by stepping back from the text, as it were, and probing his viewpoints philosophically with the aim of trying to understand what Hobbes should have been saying, what he was committed to in one area given his claims in another, and what import his ideas might have for us today.

Why feature Hobbes in a series like the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy, especially since the range of Hobbes’s works is so diverse? Would Hobbes have viewed himself primarily as a philosopher and not, say, as a humanist or mathematician?6 Hobbes did much beyond what today we call by the name ‘philosophy’, such as his labors, mentioned already, in translating works from Antiquity. However, the scope of Hobbes’s own definition of ‘philosophy’ in De corpore I.2 was incredibly broad insofar as it included any phenomenon where causes could be conceived, whether from actual causes to effects or from effects to possible causes (Hobbes 1981, 175; OL I.2). Given this definition of ‘philosophy,’ it is no surprise that Hobbes appealed to causes in contexts such as his geometry, with generative definitions like “a line is made from the motion of a point” (Hobbes 1981, 297; OL I.63), and to possible causes throughout his natural philosophy in De corpore Part IV. The appeal to causes is likewise prominent in his famous account in civil philosophy “Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of a Common-wealth” (Hobbes 2012, 254; 1651, 85).

Given this definition that delineates philosophy from all else, it seems that Hobbes himself might have excluded some of his own works from philosophy since they failed to treat of causes. Indeed, he says in De corpore I.8 that “where there is no generation or no properties, then no philosophy can be known” (Hobbes 1981, 189; OL I.9). There Hobbes declares that natural history and political history are not part of philosophy because “such knowledge [cognitio] is either experience or authority, not reasoning” (Hobbes 1981, 189; OL I.9). Thus, at first glance it would seem that Hobbes’s definition of ‘philosophy’ excludes some of his own works, such as Behemoth; Or an Epitome of the Civil Wars of England, From 1640, to 1660 (2010) since it is prima facie a work of history.

Perhaps we might see such work as done in the service of philosophy rather than as a part of philosophy proper. After all, Hobbes himself admits that natural and civil histories are “very useful (no, indeed necessary) for philosophy” (Hobbes 1981, 189; OL I.9). However, his interests in the civil war of his own time, as well as historical work on prior times, were hardly mere preparatory work for some later philosophical project. Indeed, Behemoth was presented in dialogue form, something it has in common with polemical philosophical works such as Dialogus Physicus, with interlocutor A of Behemoth sometimes seeming to recount Hobbes’s view and others times B (see Hobbes 2010, 20ff). Concerning how the civil war came about, Hobbes tells Henry Bennet, Lord Arlington, that the first dialogue “contains the seed” of it and the second shows the “growth” (2010, 106), and at the outset of that dialogue, we find interlocutor B imploring to be enlightened with A’s vantage point of the civil war: “…I pray you set me (that could not then see so well) vpon the same mountaine by the relation of the actions you then saw, and of their causes, pretensions, iustice, order, artifice, and euent” (Hobbes 2010, 107). Hobbes’s other historical works likewise serve different polemical and rhetorical ends than mere preparatory work for philosophy and often interweave causal claims as he attempts to show not just that some event had happened but also tries to explain why it did.7

A clear reason to treat Hobbes as a philosopher relates to his choice to name his trilogy the Elements of Philosophy, which he published in three sections: De corpore (1655), De homine (1658), and De cive (1642). Although the Leviathan (1651; 1668) has received significantly more attention, scholarly and otherwise, than these works, Hobbes devoted a great deal of time and attention to the Elements trilogy over the course of his writing career. We can infer, for example, that he was composing material related to the early chapters of De corpore in the 1630s and 1640s because there are extant notes on related topics from Payne and Cavendish.8 Indeed, Hobbes recounts for the reader of De cive that events beyond his control caused him to publish that work before publishing De corpore, his work concerning topics in method, first philosophy, geometry, and natural philosophy: “it happened that my country, some years before the civil war broke out, was already seething with questions of the right of Government and of the due obedience of citizens, forerunners of the approaching war” (Hobbes 1998, 13). Due to this civil unrest, Hobbes notes that he “put the rest aside and hurried on the completion” of De cive.

Another reason for examining Hobbes as a philosopher relates to the way in which he claims the parts of his thought depend upon one another. Although many philosophers today often specialize in one area or another of philosophy, Hobbes attempts, like others in his period and in the period preceding him, to offer a philosophical system with connecting points between metaphysics (first philosophy), epistemology, mathematics, natural philosophy, morality, and civil philosophy, among other areas. As has already been mentioned, this interconnectedness often led his critics to attempt to undermine central areas of his philosophy, such as his materialist metaphysics and natural philosophy, because they saw the consequences of his views in other areas as unacceptable. The remainder of this introductory chapter will consider how Hobbes presented his philosophy through his major works. Next it will discuss how A Companion to Hobbes has been organized in light of that presentation. Finally, the chapter will briefly outline strategies that try to make sense of how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophy depend upon one another.

1 The Presentation of Hobbes’s Major Writings

Broadly speaking, Hobbes’s major works follow roughly the same manner of presentation, from his early work Elements of Law (1640)9 through the two editions of Leviathan (1651 and 1668) and to the works in the trilogy Elements of Philosophy that were published between 1642 and 1658. There are many differences among these works, as some of the chapters in the present volume expose, but an overarching division in common in these writings is between what Hobbes calls natural bodies (“Bodies Naturall”) and political bodies (“Politique Bodies”) in the well-known Table provided in the English edition of Leviathan chapter 9 (2012, 130; the Table is between 1651, 40–1).10

The Table of Leviathan chapter 9 traces the consequences from the accidents of natural bodies and political bodies. Following Hobbes’s display of the consequences following from the accidents of natural bodies, at the right-hand side of the Table the reader finds the disciplines that study them, such as first philosophy (philosophia prima), geometry, architecture, astrology, optics, ethics, and “The Science of just and uniust” (2012, 131). The terminating points of the consequences from accidents of political bodies are just the following:

Of Consequences from the

Institution

of

common-wealths

, to the

Rights

, and the

Duties

of the

Body Politique

, or

Soveraign

.

Of Consequences from the same, to the

Duty

, and

Right

of the

Subjects

. (2012, 130)

At first glance, this Table might appear like a schematic overview of the structure of Hobbes’s philosophy, i.e., it may look like Hobbes is showing the reader how the different parts of his philosophy relate to one another in terms of dependence relationships. However, there are difficulties with understanding the Table in this way. For example, since disciplines such as optics and geometry are both at the furthest right-hand side of the Table, the Table provides the reader without any explanation for why it is legitimate to use geometry in optics, as Hobbes does, for example, in De homine 2. Using geometry within optics, or in other investigations such as astronomy, music, or geography, would require one to cross from one terminating point of the Table into another, but the reason why such a move would be legitimate, as Hobbes’s practice implies, is not at all evident from the Table.

Similar difficulties arise in taking the Table to show the structural dependence relationships of civil philosophy to other parts of philosophy. Indeed, the “Science of just and uniust” follows from “physiques” and not civil philosophy on the Table, showing that the line between natural bodies and political bodies may not be as precise as the Table seems to indicate. Given these difficulties in thinking of the Table as indicative of the structure of Hobbes’s philosophy, I suggest the Table is only an outline of subjects to be treated. In other words, the right-most side of the Table shows the order of subjects to be presented and not the dependence relationships among the parts of philosophy.11

Even if Hobbes did not intend the Table to display how the parts of his philosophy fit together with one another, the Table does cohere with the overall manner of presentation in his major works. The two parts of Elements of Law (1640) fit this general structure, being divided into “Humane Nature” and “De Corpore Politico,” and the Leviathan’s first two parts, Part I (“Of Man”) and Part II (“Of Common-wealth”), likewise mirror that same general structure. However, in the Elements of Philosophy trilogy, Hobbes covers much more ground than he does in Elements of Law or Leviathan. As a result, we can view the right-hand-side terminating points of the Table in Leviathan 9 as a guide to many of the additional subjects that one finds in Elements of Philosophy, and they appear in roughly the same order as they are presented on the Table. In Figure I.1, the parenthetical additions show where the right-hand-side terminating points of the Table from Leviathan 9 correspond to parts within the three sections of Elements of Philosophy, i.e., De corpore, De homine, and De cive.

Figure I.1 The order of presentation in Hobbes’s Philosophy: The Table of Leviathan 9 compared to the Elements of Philosophy trilogy.

This alignment of the right-hand side of the Table of Leviathan 9 with parts of the three sections of Elements of Philosophy leaves out some of the disciplines mentioned in the Table, such as “Science of ENGINEERS” and “ARCHITECTURE” (2012, 131), but the present aim has been to show the broad overlap in the manner of presentation among Hobbes’s major works. The next section discusses the organization of this Companion.

2 The Organization of A Companion to Hobbes

The ordering of chapters in the present volume has been modeled after the manner in which Hobbes presents his philosophy in his major works, and so it has four sections devoted to Hobbes’s thought itself: Part I (First Philosophy, Mathematics, and Natural Philosophy), Part II (Human Nature and Morality), Part III (Civil Philosophy), and Part IV (Religion). The chapters in Part V (Controversies and Reception) consider the reception of Hobbes’s ideas by his contemporaries and by later figures. The diversity of the topics discussed by the chapters of Part V reflects the engagement of critics with the different parts of his philosophy, as well as the fact that many of his interlocutors saw those parts as deeply interconnected with one another.

Considering Hobbes’s presentation of topics exposes a key fault-line present in his thought: the line between natural bodies and political bodies. If readers attend just to the Table of Leviathan chapter 9, discussed already, and to the distinctions between the parts of Hobbes’s works, this line between the natural and the political may seem clear and unproblematic. But the line between these two kinds of bodies is not precise, for even if the “Science of just and uniust” is part of the consequences from natural bodies, justice and injustice themselves do not result from human bodies considered on their own, unlike sensation or digestion. Indeed, Hobbes declares that “Justice, and Injustice are none of the Faculties neither of the Body nor the Mind” but are instead “Qualities, that related to men in Society, not in Solitude” (Hobbes 2012, 296; 1651, 63). This fault line in Hobbes’s thought figures in the discussions of a number of the chapters of the volume: Abizadeh (Chapter 6), Slomp (Chapter 7), Field (Chapter 8), Lloyd (Chapter 9), Green (Chapter 10), Brito Vieira (Chapter 11), and Rhodes (Chapter 12).

2.1 First Philosophy, Mathematics, and Natural Philosophy

Helen Hattab’s chapter “Hobbes’s Unified Method for Scientia” contrasts Hobbes’s goal of a unified method for theoretical and practical science with his Scholastic predecessors. Hattab shows that Hobbes uses ‘demonstration’ equivocally and argues that this has led scholars to think Hobbes had a single form of method in mind. Hattab argues that in fact, for Hobbes and others, there are two types of method at play: first, a universal method concerned with the ordering of concepts and definitions before one begins the work of discovery or teaching in a subject; and second, a particular method used to demonstrate conclusions. The former method provides principles that are drawn upon in applications of the particular method. However, unlike the differences that Hobbes claimed existed between him and Scholastic Aristotelians, Hattab locates this distinction within Zaberella and shows that it was continued by Keckermann and Burgersdijk, Scholastic Protestant philosophers influential in England during Hobbes’s time.

There has been interest in the Stoic influences upon Hobbes’s political philosophy, but less attention has been devoted to the relationship of Stoic ideas to Hobbes’s first philosophy and natural philosophy. Geoffrey Gorham’s chapter “The Stoic Roots of Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy and First Philosophy” shows how Hobbes’s first philosophy was influenced by Stoic thought and how that influence impacted his natural philosophy, focusing in particular on Hobbes’s views of space, time, causality, and God. These areas of Hobbes’s philosophy were especially pressing for his materialism since they seem to be concerned with incorporeal entities. Indeed, as a result some have attempted to understand Hobbes as an idealist, a subjectivist, or an atheist. Gorham shows that Hobbes’s solution, in line with Hobbes’s goal of providing a materialism that cohered with mechanical philosophy, was to understand the conceptions that grounded first philosophy as having two aspects: realist and subjectivist.

Hobbes’s exalted view of himself as a mathematician did not align with the opinions of his contemporaries. Douglas Jesseph’s chapter “Hobbesian Mathematics and the Dispute with Wallis” examines Hobbes’s philosophy of mathematics and Hobbes’s continual disagreements with John Wallis. Jesseph focuses on Hobbes’s attempts to understand geometrical objects and geometrical definitions in accordance with his materialism and furthermore on Hobbes’s disdain for analytic geometry. Their exchanges relating to mathematics can be seen as originating in 1655 with the publication of De corpore and continuing until Hobbes’s death, and beyond issues in mathematics they also concerned broader issues in theology and politics.

Continuing the focus on the unity of Hobbes’s philosophy begun in Helen Hattab’s chapter, Marcus Adams’s chapter “Explanations in Hobbes’s Optics and Natural Philosophy” examines how Hobbes’s optics and natural philosophy depend upon his geometry. Adams considers Hobbes’s descriptions about how the parts of his philosophy fit together with one another and provides case studies to show Hobbes’s practice of explanation in optics and natural philosophy. Adams suggests that Hobbes held that explanations in natural philosophy should ideally be like those in optics, showing how Hobbes’s explanations in both employ claims from experience and from a priori geometry.

2.2 Human Nature and Morality

R.W. McIntyre’s chapter “‘A Most Useful Economy’: Hobbes on Linguistic Meaning and Understanding” directs attention to the human/non-human animal divide to make sense of the role of names in language. McIntyre argues that for non-human animals, like dogs and cats, names play the role of natural signs of the passions and the will. A dog, for example, will take an instance of the name ‘walk’ as a sign that their owner is about to get the leash and take them outside. However, for humans who are competent at using language names function as symbols that aid in helping bring to mind conceptions that will guide inferences and ultimately human behavior. Beyond aiding in the increase of prudence, this ability to understand words as words that Hobbes posits allows humans to acquire universal knowledge, e.g., of all triangles, while maintaining his commitment to nominalism.

In “Hobbes’s Theory of the Good: Felicity by Anticipatory Pleasure,” Arash Abizadeh shows how Hobbes’s account of felicity was influenced by and modified ideas from Ancient Greek ethics. Abizadeh argues that Hobbes posits an ultimate, overarching good for a human life, which Hobbes conceives not as a final end or state to be realized but as an ongoing process of experiencing greater pleasures relative to pains. Contrasting Hobbes’s understanding of felicity with that of the Epicureans and the Cyrenaics, Abizadeh depicts a Hobbes who holds that felicity consists primarily in the mental pleasures arising from anticipating the satisfaction of one’s desires.

The role fear plays in humans’ escape from their natural state, as well as within the commonwealth after it has been established, has always been a point of focus among interpreters of Hobbes. Gabriella Slomp, in the chapter “In Search of ‘A Constant Civill Amity’: Hobbes on Friendship and Sociability,” compares Hobbes’s views with Aristotle’s and shows how Hobbes’s account differs in terms of the origin, nature, and conditions of “civill amity” within political states. On Slomp’s account, what emerges is a picture of Hobbesian amity that results not from reciprocity of love or care but rather from a shared understanding of the function of the Leviathan and the effort among its citizens to support it.

In the chapter “Hobbes on Power and Gender Relations,” Sandra Leonie Field considers what Hobbes’s philosophy offers to help make sense of gender relations. Field distinguishes between two models of interpersonal power relations: the dominion model and the deference model. The dominion model, which represents power as a vertical relationship of the subjection of one person to another, has been frequently associated with Hobbes by feminist scholars. While this model is reflected in Hobbes’s writings, Field suggests that this model has difficulty making sense of gender relations in a post-coverture world. In its place, Field draws attention to the deference model, which understands the complex and often non-vertical ways in which power can be expressed in gender relations. Not only does this model better aid in understanding contemporary power relations, but Field shows that this model can be found within Hobbes’s thought.

The natural state of humans – the state of nature – is one of the most evocative parts of Hobbes’s philosophy. Against understanding the state of nature as diametrically opposed to the state of civil society, S.A. Lloyd’s chapter “The State of Nature as a Continuum Concept” argues that the state of nature differs from civil society in degrees. In other words, there are states of nature rather than a simple line that is crossed upon the formation of a commonwealth. Lloyd articulates this spectrum as ranging from a condition of mere nature, characterized by a universal right of private judgment, to a perfectly totalitarian state. This approach to Hobbes’s state of nature offers an understanding of humans’ natural state that can make sense of how imperfect political systems are more or less like the mere state of nature. Lloyd argues that the continuum view is more theoretically and empirically plausible than alternative views that claim that Hobbes saw civil society as always at risk of falling back, at any moment, into the mere state of nature.

Michael Green’s chapter “Hobbes’s Minimalist Moral Theory” challenges conceptions of Hobbes’s moral theory that have taken it to follow from broader aspects of Hobbes’s philosophy, such as an aim to harmonize morality with one’s self-interest, as a type of divine-command theory, or following from an account of rationality. In place these accounts, which Green identifies as maximalist theories, Green offers a minimal theory relying upon two theses drawn from Hobbes’s discussions of the Laws of Nature: the value thesis, which holds that the laws are valued because of their role in preserving peace, and the conditional thesis, which holds that what the laws require depends upon what others do. In contrast to more maximal moral theories, Green shows that with only this minimal theory Hobbes can accomplish his goals of arguing for the benefits of the state and constructing an alternative to Aristotle’s theory of justice.

2.3 Civil Philosophy

The break between natural bodies and political bodies occurs with the creation of the commonwealth, but the ability to represent, e.g., one person representing another person, is something possible within humans’ natural state, and it is part of what enables commonwealth to be generated. Mónica Brito Vieira’s chapter “Hobbesian Persons and Representation” traces Hobbes understanding of “person” and its linkage with a capacity for agency. Persons can be natural (when someone’s words and actions are considered their own) or artificial (when someone’s words and actions are considered as representing those of someone or something else), and whoever owns the words spoken or actions done is considered the author. Hobbes furthermore differentiates between true representation, which is when the represented party authorizes its representation, and representation by fiction, which is when the represented party cannot authorize its representation, but the actions of the representative are nonetheless held (by fiction) to be its own (Hobbes 2012, 244; 1651, 80). However, Hobbes does not explicitly say what sort of person the state itself is, and there has been disagreement among scholars. Connecting Hobbes’s discussion of entities such as churches, hospitals, and bridges to the issue of the state, Vieira argues that the state is a person by fiction.

Rosamond Rhodes’s chapter “Hobbes’s Account of Authorizing a Sovereign” challenges a widely held interpretation of Hobbes’s understanding of how humans leave their natural state and authorize the sovereign: that the sovereign is a third-party beneficiary of a covenant between individuals. Against this view of Hobbesian authorization, Rhodes offers a nuanced understanding that relies upon distinguishing two steps: the establishment of the commonwealth and the subsequent authorization of the sovereign. In the time between these two steps, the commonwealth (formed in step 1) selects its form of sovereignty, whether it will be a monarchy, aristocracy, or democracy. The view of Hobbes’s sovereign that arises from Rhodes’s interpretation is of a sovereign who can be held accountable for their actions since they are party to the covenant.

Moving from focus on the sovereign to the subjects of the commonwealth, Eleanor Curran examines subjects’ rights in the chapter “The Strength and Significance of Subjects’ Rights in Leviathan