Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose current reputation rests largely on his political philosophy, was a thinker with wide-ranging interests. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelian alternatives. In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and led him into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the early Royal Society. In history, he translated Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War into English, and later wrote his own history of the Long Parliament. In mathematics he was less successful, and is best remembered for his repeated unsuccessful attempts to square the circle. But despite that, Hobbes was a serious and prominent participant in the intellectual life of his time.
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588. His home town was Malmesbury, which is in Wiltshire, England, about 30 miles east of Bristol. Very little is known about Hobbes’s mother. His father, also called Thomas Hobbes, was a somewhat disreputable local clergyman. Hobbes’s seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey tells the story of how “The old vicar Hobs was a good fellow and had been at cards Saturday all night, and at church in his sleep he cries out ‘Trafells is troumps’” [i.e., clubs are trumps] (Aubrey 1696, 1.387). The older Thomas Hobbes eventually (in 1604) left Malmesbury, when a dispute with another clergyman, Richard Jeane, escalated to the point of a fight in a churchyard. In Aubrey’s words: “Hobs stroke him and was forced to fly for it” (Aubrey 1696, 1.387).
By that point the future philosopher Hobbes had himself left Malmesbury (in 1602 or 1603), in order to study at Magdalene Hall, Oxford. His studies there were supported by his uncle, Francis Hobbes, who was a glover. After graduating from Oxford in February 1608, Hobbes went to work for the Cavendish family, initially as a tutor to William Cavendish (1590–1628), who later became the second earl of Devonshire. Hobbes would work for the same family most of the rest of his life.[1] His work for the Cavendish family is part of what allowed Hobbes to think and write as he did: it gave him access to books, and connections to other philosophers and scientists.
Hobbes’s first notable philosophical works are from around 1640. Before then he had, significantly, published in 1629 a translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War into English. Hobbes had also interacted with various prominent intellectual figures. On a trip around Europe in the mid-1630s, Hobbes met Marin Mersenne in Paris. Aubrey claims that “When he [Hobbes] was at Florence … he contracted a friendship with the famous Galileo Galilei” (Aubrey 1696, 1.366), although curiously Hobbes’s autobiographical writings do not mention this, though they do mention meeting Mersenne. Earlier on, around 1620, Hobbes worked for some time as a secretary to Francis Bacon.
Hobbes first made a notable impact with philosophical writings in the early 1640s. These included his Elements of Law and De Cive. The Elements of Law, which Hobbes circulated in 1640, is the first work in which Hobbes follows his typical systematic pattern of starting with the workings of the mind and language, and developing the discussion towards political matters. De Cive (1642) was Hobbes’s first published book of political philosophy. This work focuses more narrowly on the political: its three main sections are titled “Liberty”, “Empire” and “Religion”. However, De Cive was conceived as part of a larger work, the Elements of Philosophy. That work eventually had three parts: De Corpore (1655), De Homine (1658), and De Cive itself. De Corpore, which is discussed below, covers issues of logic, language, method, metaphysics, mathematics, and physics. De Homine, meanwhile, focuses on matters of physiology and optics.
At this time Hobbes also had a series of interactions with Descartes. In 1640 Hobbes sent to Mersenne a set of comments on Descartes’s Discourse and Optics. Descartes saw some of this, and sent a letter to Mersenne in response, to which Hobbes also responded. Then in 1641 Hobbes’s objections were among those published along with Descartes’s Meditations. In these exchanges and elsewhere, the attitudes of Hobbes and Descartes to one another involved a curious mixture of respect and dismissal. On the one occasion they are said to have met, in 1648, they did not get along well (Martinich 1999, 171). In earlier letters, Descartes suggested that Hobbes was more accomplished in moral philosophy than elsewhere, but also that he had wicked views there (Descartes 1643, 3.230–1). Descartes also worried that Hobbes was “aiming to make his reputation at my expense, and by devious means” (Descartes 1641b, 100). Aubrey reports that the two “mutually respected one another”, but also that Hobbes thought that Descartes would have been better off sticking to geometry (Aubrey 1696, 1.367).
Hobbes spent the next decade in exile in Paris, leaving England late in 1640, and not returning until 1651. His exile was related to the civil wars of the time. Hobbes was associated with the royalist side, and might also have had reason to fear punishment because of his defence of absolute sovereignty in his political philosophy. During his time in France, Hobbes continued to associate with Mersenne and his circle, including Pierre Gassendi, who seems to have been a particular friend of Hobbes’s. Late in his time in France, Hobbes wrote Leviathan, which was published in 1651. Its structure is somewhat similar to that of the Elements of Law, though it also contains lengthy discussions of matters of scriptural interpretation, and it is probably the most overtly polemical of Hobbes’s major works.
After his return to England in 1651, Hobbes continued to publish philosophical works for several years. De Corpore was published in 1655, and provides Hobbes’s main statements on several topics, such as method and the workings of language. De Homine was published in 1658, completing the plan of the Elements of Philosophy. In later years Hobbes defended his work in a series of extended debates. These included debates with John Wallis and Seth Ward that centred on Hobbes’s alleged squaring of the circle (Jesseph 1999), debates with John Bramhall about liberty and necessity (Jackson 2007), and debates with Robert Boyle about the experimental physics of the Royal Society (Shapin & Schaffer 1989). He also published a Latin edition of Leviathan in 1668, in which there were some significant changes and additions relating to controversial topics, such as his treatments of the Trinity and the nature of God. But Hobbes’s attention was not on philosophy alone. Indeed, in the 1670s he published translations of the Odyssey and Iliad. And in the late 1660s he wrote a history of the civil wars, Behemoth; or, The Long Parliament, which was published posthumously (Hobbes 1668a).
Hobbes died on 4 December 1679 at Hardwick Hall, one of the homes of the Cavendish family, with whom he was still associated after seventy years.
At an abstract level, The Elements of Law, the Elements of Philosophy, and Leviathan all share a structure. Hobbes begins with questions about mind and language, and works towards questions in political philosophy. How exactly the parts of the system are connected has long been debated. But Hobbes thinks at least that we will better understand how individuals interact in groups if we understand how individuals work. Thus the first part of The Elements of Law is titled “Human Nature” and the second “De Corpore Politico” (i.e., “About the Body Politic”). Hobbes did not insist it was necessary to work through all the issues about individuals before tackling the issues about groups, as he acknowledged when he published the third part of the Elements of Philosophy (De Cive) first. But he did think it helpful. Thus even in Leviathan, with its focus on political and religious matters, Hobbes starts with a story about the workings of the mind. The first six chapters work through issues about the senses, imagination, language, reason, knowledge, and the passions.
Hobbes is a sort of empiricist, in that he thinks all of our ideas are derived, directly or indirectly, from sensation.[2] In addition he tells a causal story about perception, which is largely the story of a causal chain of motions. The object causes (immediately or mediately) pressure on the sense organ, which causes motion inside us, all the way to the “brain and heart”. There this motion causes “a resistance, or counter-pressure, or endeavour of the heart to deliver itself; which endeavour, because outward, seemeth to be some matter without. And this seeming, or fancy, is that which men call sense” (Hobbes 1651, 1.4). Quite why this endeavour from inside to out should make the sensation seem to come from outside is unclear, for things coming from outside should be moving the other way. At any rate, the sensation is strongly grounded in, perhaps even identical with, the internal motions. But what, we might ask, is the quality? What is, say, red? In this chapter Hobbes seems happy to say that red in the object is just motions in it, and that red in us is motions in us, which give rise to or are a certain sensation. And he seems happy to avoid the issue of whether red itself belongs to the sensation or the object. In the Elements of Law, however, he had proposed the Galilean view that colours inhere in perceivers, not in the objects perceived (Hobbes 1640, 2.4)