What ideas was Hobbes wrestling with? What were his major influences? In what ways did science and religion influence these ideas?

Thomas Hobbes is rightly regarded as a monumental figure in the history of philosophy, especially for his masterpiece Leviathan (1651 in English; 1668 in Latin). The scholarly literature on Leviathan is voluminous and has been especially focused upon issues in political philosophy, such as representation and authorization, sovereignty and absolutism, contracts and covenants, and the relationship of civil authority to religion, among others. Since its printing the portrayal in Leviathan XIII of humans in their natural state—an existence that is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—has struck the imagination of many of Hobbes’ readers, leaving many seeing Hobbes as pessimistic at best or hopelessly unrealistic at worst.

In Hobbes’ own time, however, he was also well-known, even if sometimes ridiculed, for his views in mathematics, natural philosophy, and optics. In A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques (1646), Hobbes’ own assessment of his work is laudatory:

…I shall deserve the Reputation of having been the first to lay the ground of two Sciences, this of Opticques, the most curious, and that other of natural Justice, which I have done in my book de Cive, the most profitable of all other. (Hobbes 1646 [1983: 622])

Although some contemporaries saw promise in Hobbes’ optics, such as Mersenne, who published Hobbes’ work in this area in 1644 in Ballistica, in the years following the publication of Leviathan Hobbes’ pursuits apart from political philosophy were taken less seriously. There are a number of possible explanations for this decline in the opinion of Hobbes’ competence in these areas, including his numerous attempts to square the circle, the association of his views with atheism by many critics, and the conflicts he had with Robert Boyle at the time of the rise of experimental philosophy. These all contributed to some extent to Hobbes’ exclusion from the Royal Society when it was founded.

If Hobbes’ mathematical and natural-philosophical endeavors failed to be taken seriously by his contemporaries near the end of his life, what purpose is served by understanding these failed attempts?[1] Apart from interest in them on their own terms as episodes in the history of science and philosophy, there are several reasons why we may find these areas of Hobbes’ thought valuable for study. First, Hobbes himself understood his political philosophy, or as he called it “civil philosophy”, to be a science capable of demonstration. Thus, understanding his general views about the nature of scientific demonstration promises to shed light on the way in which he saw civil philosophy as scientific. Second, Hobbes understood natural-philosophical explanations in physics as needing to make use of mathematical principles to count, as he says, as “true physics”. This may seem like a banal claim to a twenty-first century reader, but it was not so to many in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Hobbes’ natural philosophy thus situates him within the shift from qualitative to quantitative physics. Third, Hobbes’ conflicts with the Royal Society show us not only his views of the role of experimentation but also contextualize the rise of experimentalism. After discussing Hobbes’ criteria for scientific knowledge, this entry will address each of these three areas. Hope this helps! Mark please!

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