Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679), whose current reputation restslargely on his political philosophy, was a thinker with wide-ranginginterests. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist,nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelianalternatives. In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and ledhim into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the earlyRoyal Society. In history, he translated Thucydides’Historyof the Peloponnesian War into English, and later wrote his ownhistory of the Long Parliament. In mathematics he was less successful,and is best remembered for his repeated unsuccessful attempts tosquare the circle. But despite that, Hobbes was a serious andprominent participant in the intellectual life of his time.

• 1. Life and Works
• 2. Mind and Language
  • 2.1 Sense and Imagination
  • 2.2 Signification
  • 2.3 Nominalism
  • 2.4 Reasoning as Computation
• 3. Materialism
• 4. Method
• 5. Philosophy of Religion
• 6. Reception
• Bibliography
  • Primary Literature
  • Secondary Literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Life and Works

Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588. His home town was Malmesbury,which is in Wiltshire, England, about 30 miles east of Bristol. Verylittle is known about Hobbes’s mother. His father, also calledThomas Hobbes, was a somewhat disreputable local clergyman.Hobbes’s seventeenth-century biographer John Aubrey tells thestory of how “The old vicar Hobs was a good fellow and had beenat 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’swords: “Hobs stroke him and was forced to fly for it”(Aubrey 1696, 1.387).

By that point the future philosopher Hobbes had himself leftMalmesbury (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 toWilliam Cavendish (1590–1628), who later became the second earlof Devonshire. Hobbes would work for the same family most of the restof his life.^[1] His work for the Cavendish family is part of what allowed Hobbes tothink and write as he did: it gave him access to books, andconnections 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 ofThucydides’History of the Peloponnesian War intoEnglish. Hobbes had also interacted with various prominentintellectual figures. On a trip around Europe in the mid-1630s, Hobbesmet Marin Mersenne in Paris. Aubrey claims that “When he[Hobbes] was at Florence … he contracted a friendship with thefamousGalileo Galilei” (Aubrey 1696, 1.366), althoughcuriously Hobbes’s autobiographical writings do not mentionthis, though they do mention meeting Mersenne. Earlier on, around1620, Hobbes worked for some time as a secretary to Francis Bacon.

Hobbes first made a notable impact with philosophical writings in theearly 1640s. These included hisElements of Law andDeCive.The Elements of Law, which Hobbes circulated in1640, is the first work in which Hobbes follows his typical systematicpattern of starting with the workings of the mind and language, anddeveloping the discussion towards political matters.De Cive(1642) was Hobbes’s first published book of politicalphilosophy. This work focuses more narrowly on the political: itsthree main sections are titled “Liberty”,“Empire” and “Religion”. However,DeCive was conceived as part of a larger work, theElements ofPhilosophy. That work eventually had three parts:DeCorpore (1655),De Homine (1658), andDe Civeitself.De Corpore, which is discussed below, covers issuesof logic, language, method, metaphysics, mathematics, and physics.De Homine, meanwhile, focuses on matters of physiology andoptics.

At this time Hobbes also had a series of interactions with Descartes.In 1640 Hobbes sent to Mersenne a set of comments on Descartes’sDiscourse andOptics. Descartes saw some of this,and sent a letter to Mersenne in response, to which Hobbes alsoresponded. Then in 1641 Hobbes’s objections were among thosepublished along with Descartes’sMeditations. In theseexchanges and elsewhere, the attitudes of Hobbes and Descartes to oneanother involved a curious mixture of respect and dismissal. On theone occasion they are said to have met, in 1648, they did not getalong well (Martinich 1999, 171). In earlier letters, Descartessuggested that Hobbes was more accomplished in moral philosophy thanelsewhere, but also that he had wicked views there (Descartes 1643,3.230–1). Descartes also worried that Hobbes was “aimingto make his reputation at my expense, and by devious means”(Descartes 1641b, 100). Aubrey reports that the two “mutuallyrespected one another”, but also that Hobbes thought thatDescartes would have been better off sticking to geometry (Aubrey1696, 1.367).

Hobbes spent the next decade in exile in Paris, leaving England latein 1640, and not returning until 1651. His exile was related to thecivil wars of the time. Hobbes was associated with the royalist side,and might also have had reason to fear punishment because of hisdefence of absolute sovereignty in his political philosophy. Duringhis time in France, Hobbes continued to associate with Mersenne andhis circle, including Pierre Gassendi, who seems to have been aparticular friend of Hobbes’s. Late in his time in France,Hobbes wroteLeviathan, which was published in 1651. Itsstructure is somewhat similar to that of theElements of Law,though it also contains lengthy discussions of matters of scripturalinterpretation, and it is probably the most overtly polemical ofHobbes’s major works.

After his return to England in 1651, Hobbes continued to publishphilosophical works for several years.De Corpore waspublished in 1655, and provides Hobbes’s main statements onseveral topics, such as method and the workings of language.DeHomine was published in 1658, completing the plan of theElements of Philosophy. In later years Hobbes defended hiswork in a series of extended debates. These included debates with JohnWallis and Seth Ward that centred on Hobbes’s alleged squaringof the circle (Jesseph 1999), debates with John Bramhall about libertyand necessity (Jackson 2007), and debates with Robert Boyle about theexperimental physics of the Royal Society (Shapin & Schaffer1989). He also published a Latin edition ofLeviathan in1668, in which there were some significant changes and additionsrelating to controversial topics, such as his treatments of theTrinity and the nature of God. But Hobbes’s attention was not onphilosophy alone. Indeed, in the 1670s he published translations oftheOdyssey andIliad. And in the late 1660s hewrote a history of the civil wars,Behemoth; or, The LongParliament, which was published posthumously (Hobbes 1668a).

Hobbes died on 4 December 1679 at Hardwick Hall, one of the homes ofthe Cavendish family, with whom he was still associated after seventyyears.

2. Mind and Language

At an abstract level,The Elements of Law, theElementsof Philosophy, andLeviathan all share a structure.Hobbes begins with questions about mind and language, and workstowards questions in political philosophy. How exactly the parts ofthe system are connected has long been debated. But Hobbes thinks atleast that we will better understand how individuals interact ingroups if we understand how individuals work. Thus the first part ofThe Elements of Law is titled “Human Nature” andthe second “De Corpore Politico” (i.e., “About theBody Politic”). Hobbes did not insist it was necessary to workthrough all the issues about individuals before tackling the issuesabout groups, as he acknowledged when he published the third part oftheElements of Philosophy (De Cive) first. But hedid think it helpful. Thus even inLeviathan, with its focuson political and religious matters, Hobbes starts with a story aboutthe workings of the mind. The first six chapters work through issuesabout the senses, imagination, language, reason, knowledge, and thepassions.

2.1 Sense and Imagination

Hobbes is a sort of empiricist, in that he thinks all of our ideas arederived, directly or indirectly, from sensation.^[2] In addition he tells a causal story about perception, which islargely the story of a causal chain of motions. The object causes(immediately or mediately) pressure on the sense organ, which causesmotion inside us, all the way to the “brain and heart”.There this motion causes “a resistance, or counter-pressure, orendeavour of the heart to deliver itself; which endeavour, becauseoutward, seemeth to be some matter without. And thisseeming, orfancy, is that which men callsense” (Hobbes 1651, 1.4). Quite why this endeavour from insideto out should make the sensation seem to come from outside is unclear,for things coming from outside should be moving the other way. At anyrate, the sensation is strongly grounded in, perhaps even identicalwith, the internal motions. But what, we might ask, is the quality?What is, say, red? In this chapter Hobbes seems happy to say that redin the object is just motions in it, and that red in us is motions inus, which give rise to or are a certain sensation. And he seems happyto avoid the issue of whether red itself belongs to the sensation orthe object. In theElements of Law, however, he had proposedthe Galilean view that colours inhere in perceivers, not in theobjects perceived (Hobbes 1640, 2.4)

Imagination is Hobbes’s next topic. His basic thought is thatour sensations remain after the act of sensing, but in a weaker way:“after the object is removed, or the eye shut, we still retainan image of the thing seen, though more obscure than when we seeit” (Hobbes 1651, 2.2). This is a story about how we form ideas.More generally, imagination has a crucial role in Hobbes’spicture of the workings of the mind. One sort of imagination is whatwe would now call imagination, “as when from the sight of a manat one time, and of a horse at another, we conceive in our mind aCentaur” (Hobbes 1651, 2.4). That is, we can take the ideas, thefaded sensations, from different experiences and combine themtogether. But Hobbes also connects imagination, and “the facultyof imagining” (Hobbes 1651, 2.10) closely to memory and tounderstanding. Imagination and memory, Hobbes says, are the samething, with two names that point to different aspects of thephenomenon of decaying sense. If we want to point to the idea or imageitself, we use ‘imagination’, but if we want to point tothe decay, we use ‘memory’ (Hobbes 1651, 2.3).

Moreover, Hobbes thinks that understanding is a sort of imagination.That is, the faculty of imagining is responsible for understanding, aswell as for compounding images and for memory. Understanding is,Hobbes says, “[t]he imagination that is raised in man (or anyother creature endued with the faculty of imagining) by words or othervoluntary signs” (Hobbes 1651, 2.10). Understanding is notrestricted to humans. So, for example, “a dog by custom willunderstand the call … of its master” (Hobbes 1651, 2.10).But humans have a sort of understanding that other creatures lack. Adog, for instance, can understand the will of its owner, say that itsowner wants it to sit down. In general, the understanding thatnon-human animals can have is the understanding of will. But humanscan also understand the “conceptions and thoughts” (Hobbes1651, 2.10) of others from their uses of language.

Understanding is for Hobbes the work of the faculty of imagination,and crucially involves language. An account of the workings oflanguage is thus crucial for his having an account of the workings ofthe mind. For Hobbes, the mind contains sense, imagination, and theworkings of language, and no further rational faculty, such as theCartesian immaterial mind that can grasp natures by clear and distinctperception. His story about sensation, the formation of ideas, and theworkings of imagination is supposed to explain how some of our thoughtworks. But only with the further story about language andunderstanding in place does he have a full alternative toDescartes’s story about our cognitive faculties. For Descartes,sense and imagination are, as in Hobbes’s story, closelyconnected to the workings of the brain, but higher cognitive functionsare performed by the immaterial mind. Hobbes denies the existence ofthat immaterial mind, and needs other accounts of those functions.This – combined no doubt with some independent interest in thetopic – leads to Hobbes devoting a fair amount of attention toissues in the philosophy of language.

2.2 Signification

Hobbes’s account of language is crucial for his account of themind, and has important connections to his views in politicalphilosophy (Pettit 2008). Reading Hobbes’s various accounts oflanguage, it quickly becomes clear that the notion of signification iscentral. It is apparently the central semantic relationship inHobbes’s story, playing the sort of role that’s played inmore recent accounts by meaning or sense or reference (Abizadeh 2015;Pécharman 2004). But what is signification? One importantquestion here is whether and how Hobbes distinguishes signification(and the thing signified) from naming (and the thing named).

When Hobbes introduces his story about names in theThe Elementsof Law he tells us that “A NAME or APPELLATION therefore isthe voice of a man, arbitrarily imposed, for a mark to bring to hismind some conception concerning the thing on which it is imposed.Things named are either the objects themselves, as man; or theconception itself that we have of man, as shape or motion; or someprivation, which is when we conceive that there is something which weconceive, not in him” (Hobbes 1640, 5.2–3). That is,Hobbes first introduces names as having a private use for individuals,to help them to bring particular ideas to mind. (Hobbes uses‘name’ in a very broad sense. In that chapter alone, hegives ‘Socrates’, ‘Homer’, ‘man’,‘just’, ‘valiant’, ‘strong’,‘comely’, and ‘faith’ as example of names.)Notice here that though the point of using names is to recall ideas,the thing named is not necessarily an idea. It may well be an externalobject such as, in Hobbes’s example, a man. Later in thatchapter, Hobbes starts to talk explicitly about signifying rather thannaming. Thus in talking about ambiguity Hobbes says that “theword faith sometimes signifieth the same with belief; sometimes itsignifieth particularly that belief which maketh a Christian; andsometimes it signifieth the keeping of a promise” (Hobbes 1640,5.7). However, it is not at all clear that he really means tointroduce signifying as a relation distinct from naming here. Indeed,he seems rather to be giving the same relation two differentnames.

InLeviathan andDe Corpore something more complexgoes on (Duncan 2011). The equivalent chapters inLeviathanandDe Corpore start in the same way, with discussions of therole of names as marks to aid the memory (Hobbes 1651, 4.3; Hobbes1655, 2.1). However, both then go straight on to introduce anotherrole for names, as signs to the hearer of the speaker’s thoughts(Hobbes 1651, 4.3; Hobbes 1655, 2.2–5). And‘signify’ appears to be the verb corresponding to whatsigns do. Though there are hints of this account inLeviathan, it is set out in most detail inDeCorpore. There Hobbes says that names alone are not signs:“they are not signs except insofar as they are arranged inspeech and are its parts” (Hobbes 1655, 2.3). So when we talkabout signification, it’s the act of signifying, ofcommunicating one’s thoughts by using words that are a sign ofthem, that is basic. In other terminology, while words name things,it’s utterances that have signification.

Someone might think that, and nevertheless have a derivative notion ofwhat a word signifies. Hobbes takes some steps in this direction. Inparticular, we can understand two words having the same significationas their being interchangeable without changing the signification ofthe utterance (Hungerland and Vick 1981, 68). Thus Hobbes uses‘signify’ when talking about a translation relation, aswhen he says inLeviathan that “the Greeks call itfancy, which signifiesappearance” (Hobbes1651, 2.2). And some interpreters go further, and take Hobbes tobelieve that words signify ideas, which are the ideas they call tomind when used in utterances.

2.3 Nominalism

Hobbes is a nominalist: he believes that the only universal things arenames (Hobbes 1640, 5.6–7; Hobbes 1651, 4.6–8; Hobbes1655, 2.9). The word ‘tree’ is, Hobbes thinks, a universalor common name that names each of the trees. There is one name, andthere are many trees. But there is not, Hobbes argues, some furtherthing that is the universal tree. Nor is there some universal ideathat is somehow of each or all of the trees. Rather,‘tree’ names each of the trees, each of the individuals towhich the term applies (not, note, the collection of them).

What Hobbes calls common names, those words which apply to multiplethings, are applied because of similarities between those things, notbecause of any relation to a universal thing or idea. There are, inthe minds of speakers, ideas related to those names, but they are notabstract or general ideas, but individual images of individual things.I could use ‘tree’ now, associating it with a tall pinetree, and tomorrow use ‘tree’ but have before my mind ashort beech tree. What matters, Hobbes says, is that “weremember that vocal sounds of this kind sometimes evoked one thing inthe mind, sometimes something else” (Hobbes 1655, 2.9).

Hobbes’s nominalism was recognized by his contemporaries, butwas also criticized as going too far. Leibniz put the point asfollows.

Hobbes seems to me to be a super-nominalist. For not content like thenominalists, to reduce universals to names, he says that the truth ofthings itself consists in names and what is more, that it depends onthe human will, because truth allegedly depends on the definitions ofterms, and definitions depend on the human will. This is the opinionof a man recognized as among the most profound of our century, and asI said, nothing can be more nominalistic than it. Yet it cannot stand.In arithmetic, and in other disciplines as well, truths remain thesame even if notations are changed, and it does not matter whether adecimal or a duodecimal number system is used (Leibniz 1670, 128).

Similar worries, that Hobbes’s views could not account for thefact that the same truths can be expressed in different languages,were expressed by Descartes in his reply to Hobbes’s objectionsto theMeditations (Descartes 1641a, 2.126) and by Henry Morein hisImmortality of the Soul (More 1659, 133–4).Hobbes would apparently say, given his story about signification, that“This bag is red” has the same signification as“Diese Tasche ist rot”. However, he does endorse variousclaims about aspects of language and truth being conventional andarbitrary. Some such claims are widely agreed upon: whether we writefrom left to right or right to left, for instance, and what particularmarks we choose to represent words on paper. But Hobbes also endorsesother, more controversial, claims of this sort. Most controversiallyperhaps, Hobbes thinks that there is a conventionality andarbitrariness in the way in which we divide the world up in to kinds.Though the application of ‘red’ to some objects and notothers is based on similarities between those objects, thesimilarities do not demand that we group exactly those objectstogether under a name. That is, the groupings and kinds, though basedin similarities, are not determined by those similarities alone, butalso and primarily by our decisions, which involve awareness of thesimilarities, but also an arbitrary element. This introduces an extraarbitrary element into the truth of ‘This bag is red’, foreven if all the underlying similarities had been the same, we mighthave, say, drawn the line between red and orange in a different place.However, it’s not at all clear that such arbitrariness givesrise to the problematic consequences that Descartes and Leibniz thinkit does (Bolton 1977).

2.4 Reasoning as Computation

Hobbes describes reasoning as computation, and offers sketches of thecomputation that he thinks is going on when we reason. This idea mightappear to have significant connections to later views, both to someviews of Leibniz’s and to more recent approaches that adopt acomputational theory of mind. This section looks at Hobbes’spresentation of the idea, and then briefly at these two possibleconnections.

InDe Corpore Hobbes first describes the view that reasoningis computation early in chapter one. “By reasoning”, hesays “I understand computation. And to compute isto collectthe sum of many things added together at the same time, or to know theremainder when one thing has been taken from another. To reasontherefore is the same asto add ortosubtract” (Hobbes 1655, 1.2). In the section that follows,Hobbes gives some initial examples of addition in reasoning, which areexamples of adding ideas together to form more complex ones. Thus“from the conceptions of a quadrilateral figure, an equilateralfigure, and a rectangular figure the conception of a square iscomposed” (Hobbes 1655, 1.3). That’s but a small part ofour mental activity though. Hobbes also describes propositions andsyllogisms as sorts of addition:

a syllogism is nothing other than a collection of a sum which is madefrom two propositions (through a common term which is called a middleterm) conjoined to one another; and thus a syllogism is an addition ofthree names, just as a proposition is of two (Hobbes 1655, 4.6).

A proposition is in a sense formed by adding the name of the predicateto the name of the subject, so by adding ‘snow’ and‘white’ we get ‘snow is white’. (We add‘is’ as well, but as Hobbes argues, it’s notnecessary, for we could indicate the same thing by word order ratherthan having an extra word as the copula.) In thinking aboutsyllogisms, think about the example “Every man is an animal;every animal is a body; therefore every man is a body” (Hobbes1655, 4.4). In some sense we add the propositions, or at least bits ofthem: we add the subject of the first proposition to the predicate ofthe second, aided in this by the middle term.

This is an intriguing suggestion, but seems not to be very fardeveloped. This addition has to follow some rules, especially in thesyllogistic case. As Hobbes says, “Every man is an animal; someanimal is a quadruped; therefore, some man is a quadruped” is“defective” (Hobbes 1655, 4.4). But its conclusion tooinvolves the addition of parts of the premises. Presumably syllogisticaddition, like arithmetic addition, must have its rules. And ofcourse, Hobbes was aware of the properties of various good and badarguments. But it’s not clear what he added to that discussionby bringing in the language of addition. Nor, indeed, is it clear whathe really added to his discussion of the workings of the mind by hisoccasional use of such language.

Nevertheless, the notion that reasoning is computation has beenreferred back to more than once. Leibniz explicitly endorsed anddeveloped it in one early work: “Thomas Hobbes, everywhere aprofound examiner of principles, rightly stated that everything doneby our mind is acomputation, by which is to be understoodeither the addition of a sum or the subtraction of a difference… So just as there are two primary signs of algebra andanalytics, + and −, in the same way there are as it were twocopulas, ‘is’ and ‘is not’” (Leibniz1666, 3). And the idea appears to have continued to hold some appealfor him. Thus for example Leibniz’s numerical characteristic(Leibniz 1679) attempts in another way to use the language of additionand subtraction to explain aspects of reasoning.

Much more recently, some philosophers discussing the computationaltheory of mind have also seen connections to Hobbes’s idea. Thecentral idea of a modern computational theory of mind is that the mindis a sort of computer. More precisely and technically, “theimmediately implementing mechanisms for intentional laws arecomputational … [Computations] viewed in intension,are mappings from symbols under syntactic description to symbols undersyntactic description” (Fodor 1994, 8). And very roughly, wemight see Hobbes as saying the same thing. There are various mentalprocesses (compounding ideas, forming propositions, reasoningsyllogistically) that we can describe without knowing that reasoningis computation. But the underlying process that’s making thisall work is computation, namely, addition and subtraction. Theconnections seem to amount to no more than that though, so it’sat least rather over-dramatic to say that Hobbes was“prophetically launching Artificial Intelligence”(Haugeland 1985, 23).

3. Materialism

By the time ofLeviathan andDe Corpore, Hobbes wasconvinced that human beings (including their minds) were entirely material.^[3] Later on he came to think that even God was a sort of material being(Gorham 2013, Springborg 2012). This section focuses on Hobbes’smaterialism about human beings. This was not a popular or widely-heldposition at the time. Hobbes, however, was a materialist. Why was he amaterialist?

We might suspect that Hobbes’s story about the workings of mindand language (e.g., in the early chapters ofLeviathan) issupposed to be an implicit argument for materialism.‘Look’, we might take Hobbes to be saying, ‘I canexplain all the workings of the mind using only material resources.What need is there to postulate an immaterial mind when this perfectlygood, and more minimal, explanation is available?’ Hobbesperhaps suggests this when he notes that his nominalism means we donot need to suppose there’s any faculty other than imaginationin order to understand how universal thought works (Hobbes 1655, 2.9).However, for the most part we do not find Hobbes explicitly statingthat argument. Instead he presents a series of arguments againstvarious opponents’ beliefs in immaterial beings (includingimmaterial human minds).

There is a prominent suggestion inLeviathan that ourdiscourse about incorporeal things constitutes “insignificantspeech”.

All other names are but insignificant sounds; and those of two sorts.One when they are new, and yet their meaning not explained bydefinition; whereof there have been abundance coined by schoolmen, andpuzzled philosophers.

Another, when men make a name of two names, whose significations arecontradictory and inconsistent; as this name, anincorporealbody, or (which is all one) anincorporealsubstance, and a great number more. For whensoever anyaffirmation is false, the two names of which it is composed, puttogether and made one, signify nothing at all (Hobbes 1655,4.20–1).

Thus Hobbes apparently thinks that talk about incorporeal substances(such as Cartesian unextended thinking things) is just nonsense. Butwhy does he think that? Hobbes’s comment about falseaffirmations suggests he thinks that ‘incorporealsubstance’ is insignificant because ‘a substance isincorporeal’ is false. But that seems to derive theinsignificance from the truth of materialism, which is hardly going toconvince Hobbes’s opponents. Hobbes does offer a supportingargument, when he claims that ‘incorporeal substance’ and‘incorporeal body’ are “all one”. But thatpremise too will be denied by his opponents, who think that there canbe substances that are not bodies, and that ‘substance’and ‘body’ are far from interchangeable terms.

Hobbes offers a further argument against his opponents’ beliefin immaterial things inDe Corpore, in a passage in which hetalks at length about the “gross errors” ofphilosophers.

But the abuse consists in this, that when some men see that theincreases and decreases of quantity, heat, and other accidents can beconsidered, that is, submitted to reasons, as we say, withoutconsideration of bodies or their subjects (which is called“abstraction” or “existence apart from them”),they talk about accidents as if they could be separated from everybody. The gross errors of certain metaphysicians take their originfrom this; for from the fact that it is possible to consider thinkingwithout considering body, they infer that there is no need for athinking body; and from the fact that it is possible to considerquantity without considering body, they also think that quantity canexist without body and body without quantity, so that a quantitativebody is made only after quantity has been added to a body. Thesemeaningless vocal sounds, “abstract substances,”“separated essence,” and other similar ones, spring fromthe same fountain (Hobbes 1655, 3.4).

The key mistake, Hobbes thinks, lies in moving from the observationsthat we can talk about ‘A’ and ‘B’, and canthink about A without thinking about B, to the conclusion that A canexist without B existing. Hobbes attacks various views associated withthe Scholastic Aristotelian tradition as resting on that mistake. Oneaim of this critical passage is to support materialism by showing aproblem with the belief that there can be thought without a body.Hobbes elsewhere claims that Aristotle thinks that “the humansoul, separated from man, subsists by itself”, so presumably hasAristotle and Aristotelians in mind as targets (Hobbes 1668b,46.17).

When Hobbes talks about Aristotelian views, one might ask whether histarget is Aristotle himself, or some later Aristotelians. When Hobbestalks about Aristotelian metaphysics in particular, his main approachseems to be to take a certain core view to have beenAristotle’s, then to criticize both that view and the furtheruses that were made of it. Hobbes’s attitude to Aristotelianismcomes across forcefully in a discussion inBehemoth thatbegins by describing Peter Lombard and John Duns Scotus as writinglike “two of the most egregious blockheads in the world”(Hobbes 1668a, 41–2). That exchange has several elements: thecondemnation of the philosophical view as nonsensical; the claim thatsome philosophers aim to confuse; and the claim that views arepromoted in order to control the public and take their money. However,though Hobbes rejected many of the views of the ScholasticAristotelian tradition, his work had several connectionsto it, as is illustrated by Leijenhorst 2002.

The view that there can be thought without a body is alsoDescartes’s view. Indeed, Hobbes may be thinking ofDescartes’s argument for that view in the Sixth Meditation. Akey claim in Descartes’s argument is that “the fact that Ican clearly and distinctly understand one thing apart from another isenough to make me certain that the two things are distinct”(Descartes 1641a, 2.54). Descartes argues, via that claim, from hisability to clearly and distinctly conceive of mind apart from body andvice versa, to the conclusion that mind and body are really distinct(i.e., are two substances, not one). Abstracting away from thedetails, we have an argument from the conceivability of mind withoutbody to the conclusion that the mind is not physical. And such anargument is one of Hobbes’s targets in the “grosserrors” passage.

However Descartes, by endorsing that argument, does not endorse theclaim that ‘if I can conceive of A’s existing withoutB’s existing, then A can exist without B existing’. Heendorses at most the weaker claim that ‘if I can clearly anddistinctly conceive of A’s existing without B existing, then Acan exist without B existing’. There’s a special sort ofconceivability involved here, clear and distinct conceivability, whichlicenses the move in this case but not in general. Hobbes’sargument seems blind to this distinction.

Overall then, something of a puzzle remains. Hobbes clearly was amaterialist about the natural world, but the explicit arguments heoffers for the view seem rather weak. Perhaps he just had a good dealof confidence in the ability of the rapidly developing science of thehis time to proceed towards a full material explanation of the mind.Just as his contemporary William Harvey, of whom he thought veryhighly, had made such progress in explaining biological matters, sotoo (Hobbes might have thought) might we expect further scientists tosucceed in explaining mental matters.

4. Method

Hobbes was very much interested in scientific explanationof the world: both its practice (which he saw himself as engaged in)and also its theory. Chapter 9 ofLeviathan tells ussomething about the differences between scientific and historicalknowledge, and the divisions between sciences. Chapter 6 ofDeCorpore gives a much fuller treatment of issues in the philosophyof science, issues of what Hobbes calls method. Method tells us how toinvestigate things in order to achievescientia, the bestsort of knowledge.

Those writing about Hobbes’s method have tended to tell one orother of two stories about the sort of method he proposes and itshistorical roots. One story emphasizes the connections betweenHobbes’s method and Aristotelian approaches. This has often beendeveloped into a story about the particular influence on Hobbes of theworks of Giacomo Zabarella, a sixteenth-century Aristotelian whostudied and taught at the University of Padua, which influence is thenoften said to have been somehow mediated by Galileo. The alternativestory emphasizes the connections between Hobbes’s general viewsabout method and the traditions of thinking about method in geometry.Here the notions of analysis and synthesis are key. Oddly enough, bothof these stories can be connected to anecdotes that Aubrey tells aboutHobbes: on the one hand, the report that Hobbes became friendly withGalileo while traveling in Italy, and on the other, the tale of howHobbes became fascinated with geometry at the age of forty afterlooking at copy of Euclid’sElements, not believing aproposition, and tracing back the demonstration of it and thepropositions on which it depended.

This section tells a version of the first story. (For a helpful recentcritical discussion of such an approach, see Hattab 2014.) Still, oneshould note that Hobbes sometimes uses the language of mathematicalmethod, of analysis and synthesis, in describing his general method(Hobbes 1655, 6.1). Several commentators have seen this, together withhis clear admiration for the successes of geometry, as evidence of amore general use of mathematical notions in his account of method(Talaska 1988). Adams 2019 argues that Hobbes “proceeds by amethod of synthetic demonstration” in both geometry andpolitical philosophy. And it might indeed be the case that bothstories about Hobbes’s method (the Zabarellan and themathematical) have some truth to them.

Those writing about Hobbes often describe Zabarella’s method ashaving two parts, resolution and composition. Resolution moves fromthe thing to be explained, which is an effect, to its causes, and thencomposition brings you back from causes to effects. At a suitablygeneral level that is correct, but it misses much detail. Mostimportantly, Zabarella’s method — as seen for instance inhis workDe Regressu – is better described as havingthree parts. A crucial though somewhat mysterious third step standsbetween the move from effect to cause and that from effect to cause.The complete sequence, the arguments from effect to cause and backagain, Zabarella callsregressus. This sequence improves ourknowledge, taking us from confused to clear knowledge of something.But how do we do this? The first step is to move from having confusedknowledge of the effect to having confused knowledge of the cause.Roughly, you need to figure out what caused the thing you’retrying to explain. The second step moves from confused to clearknowledge of the cause. This step works, Zabarella thinks, by a sortof intellectual examination of the cause. The aim is not just to knowwhat thing is the cause, but to understand that thing. The final stepthen moves from the clear knowledge of the cause to clear knowledge ofthe effect. That is, your new full understanding of the cause givesyou better understanding of the thing caused by it.

Chapter six ofDe Corpore is Hobbes’s main work onmethod. There Hobbes lays out a model of the proper form of ascientific explanation. A proper explanation tells you three things:what the cause is, the nature of the cause, and how the cause givesrise to the effect. Thus Hobbes accepts the Aristotelian idea that tohave the best sort of knowledge, scientific knowledge, is to knowsomething through its causes. Similarities to Aristotelian theoriessuch as Zabarella’s show up even in section one of chapter six.Here Hobbes defines philosophy as knowledge acquired by correctreasoning. It is both knowledge of effects that you get throughconception of their causes and knowledge of causes that you getthrough conception of their visible effects. Already we see signs ofthe Aristotelian picture in which you come to know the cause byknowing the visible effect and to know the effect by knowing thecause.

Moreover, there is perhaps in Hobbes’s method something like themiddle step ofregressus. For Hobbes, to know an effectthrough its causes is to know what the causes are and how they work:“We are saidto know scientifically some effectwhen we know what its causes are, in what subject they are, inwhat subject they introduce the effect, and how they do it”(Hobbes 1655, 6.1). The requirement to know how the cause works, notjust what it is, is analogous to the Zabarellan requirement to havedistinct knowledge of a cause. Knowledge that the cause exists comesfrom the first step ofregressus. Completeregressus, i.e., complete explanation, requires that you makea fuller investigation of the cause. For Hobbes, analogously, to gettoscientia of the effect you need to understand, not justwhat the causes are, but how they work.

Comparison of Hobbes’s view to Zabarella’s and other morefully Aristotelian ones is complicated by Hobbes’s thinking thatall causes are efficient causes and that motion is the cause of allchange in the natural world. In a more fully Aristotelian picture,explanations are causal, but causes can be of several sorts.Hobbes’s picture is more restrictive: to find the causes is tofind the efficient causes. Moreover, he thinks the efficient causesare all motions, so the search for causes becomes the search formotions and mechanisms.

For all that there do seem to be similarities between Hobbes’smethod and older Aristotelian approaches, one might well wonder howHobbes could have come to know about Zabarella’s views inparticular. One story is that Hobbes learned about this method fromGalileo, but that claim is problematic. Galileo did know aboutZabarella’s ideas and other similar ones (Wallace 1984).However, the texts of Galileo in which signs of Zabarellan ideas areevident are early ones, but Hobbes knew Galileo’s thoughtthrough his later published works. But even if theZabarella-Galileo-Hobbes story is hard to support, there are otherways in which Hobbes might have learned of Zabarella’s work.Harvey, whose work Hobbes greatly admired, and who studied at themedical school in Padua, might also have been an intermediary (Watkins1973, 41–2). And it’s far from ridiculous to contemplateHobbes reading the work of the popular logician Zabarella.

5. Philosophy of Religion

Hobbes’s views about religion have been disputed at greatlength, and a wide range of positions have been attributed to him,from atheism to orthodox Christianity. This section focuses on twocentral questions: whether Hobbes believes in the existence of God,and whether he thinks there can be knowledge from revelation. Someimportant aspects of Hobbes’s approach to religion are leftaside. These include religion’s role in politics (Lloyd 1992),and the question of whether God plays some fundamental role inHobbes’s ethical system (see Warrender 1957 and Martinich 1992,but also Nagel 1959 and Darwall 1994).

Hobbes at one point rules a good deal of religious discussion out ofphilosophy, because its topics are not susceptible to the fulldetailed causal explanation that is required forscientia,the best sort of knowledge. “Thus philosophy excludes fromitself theology, as I call the doctrine about the nature andattributes of the eternal, ungenerable, and incomprehensible God, andin whom no composition and no division can be established and nogeneration can be understood” (Hobbes 1655, 1.8). Also excludedare discussion of angels, of revelation, and of the proper worship ofGod. But despite these not being, strictly speaking, philosophy,Hobbes does in fact have a good deal to say about them, most notablyinLeviathan. Things outside philosophy (in its strict sense)may not be amenable to thorough causal explanation in terms of themotions of bodies, but they may well still be within the limits ofrational discussion.

Many people have called Hobbes an atheist, both during his lifetimeand more recently. However, the word ‘atheist’ did notmean the same thing in the seventeenth century as it means now. Thuswhen Mintz (1962), in a study of Hobbes’s critics that oftenmentions atheism, summarizes the reasons those critics gave forcalling Hobbes an atheist, he lists the views

that the universe is body, that God is part of the world and thereforebody, that the Pentateuch and many other books of Scripture areredactions or compilations from earlier sources, that the members ofthe Trinity are Moses, Jesus, and the Apostles, that few if anymiracles can be credited after the Testamental period, that no personsdeserve the name of ‘martyr’ expect those who witnessedthe ascension of Christ, that witchcraft is a myth and heaven adelusion, that religion is in fact so muddled with superstition as tobe in many vital places indistinguishable from it, [and] that theChurch, both in its government and its doctrine, must submit to thedictates of Leviathan, the supreme civil authority (Mintz 1962,45).

Thus, many of Hobbes’s critics in the seventeenth century,including those who vehemently attacked his religious views, stillthought he believed in the existence of God. They thought, however,that he was a rather dubious sort of Christian. Other critics,however, have thought that Hobbes in fact denied the existence of God.This might seem a curious allegation, for Hobbes often talks about Godas existing. Certainly, to read Hobbes in this way requires one totake some of his statements at something other than face value.

In theElements of Law Hobbes offers a cosmological argumentfor the existence of God (Hobbes 1640, 11.2). However, he argues, theonly thing we can know about God is that he, “first cause of allcauses”, exists. Our knowledge is limited in this way becauseour thoughts about God are limited: “we can have no conceptionor image of the Deity”. So when we seem to attribute features toGod, we cannot literally be describing God (Hobbes 1640, 11.3).We’re either expressing our inability, as when we call Godincomprehensible, or we’re expressing our reverence, as when wecall God omniscient and just. The same indeed is going on when we callGod a spirit: this is not “a name of anything weconceive”, but again a “signification of ourreverence” (Hobbes 1640, 11.3).

Those three views — support for a cosmological argument, thebelief that God is inconceivable by us, and the interpretation ofapparent descriptions of God as not really descriptions — appearto recur inLeviathan (Hobbes 1651, 11.25, 12.6–9).However, in later work, such as the appendix to the 1668 Latin editionofLeviathan, Hobbes proposes a different view. The olderHobbes thought that we could know God to have at least one feature,namely extension. In hisAnswer to Bishop Bramhall, Hobbesdescribes God as a “corporeal spirit” (Hobbes 1662,4.306). By this he means at least that God is extended. Indeed, Hobbesseems to think of God as a sort of extended thing that’s mixedthrough the rest of the world, not being in every individual place inthe world, but able to affect all the things in the world (Hobbes1662, 4.306–13, especially 4.309–10).

Whatever one thinks of the orthodoxy of Hobbes’s earlier views— and one might take the holder of those views just to be a veryserious believer in the rather orthodox view that God isincomprehensible — this later view that God is corporeal isstrange indeed. However, Hobbes does seem in hisAnswer to BishopBramhall and the Appendix to the Latin edition ofLeviathan to believe this strange view sincerely. Indeed, hegoes to some pains to defend this as an acceptable version ofChristianity. Whether or not one believes that, this is still on thesurface an odd theism rather than atheism.

Even if Hobbes is some sort of theist, he’s a theist who issceptical about many widely held religious views. This is notable tosome extent in his critical reading of biblical texts, which was notat all a standard approach at the time. Indeed, Hobbes and Spinozaoften get a good deal of credit for developing this approach.It’s notable too in his treatment of matters related torevelation.

In chapter 2 ofLeviathan Hobbes comes to these topics at aslightly surprising point. In the course of discussing the workings ofimagination, he talks naturally enough about dreams. Emphasizing theoccasional difficulty of distinguishing dreams from waking life, heturns to talk of visions. Dreams had in stressful circumstances, whenone sleeps briefly, are sometimes taken as visions, Hobbes says. Heuses this to explain a supposed vision had by Marcus Brutus, and alsowidespread belief in ghosts, goblins, and the like. Later he uses itto account for visions of God (Hobbes 1651, 32.6). And Hobbesexplicitly uses this to undermine the plausibility of claims to knowthings because told by God:

To say he [God] hath spoken to him in a dream is no more than to saythat he dreamed God spake to him, which is not of force to win belieffrom any man that knows dreams are for the most part natural and mayproceed from former thoughts … To say he hath seen a vision, orheard a voice, is to say that he hath dreamed between sleeping andwaking; for in such a manner a man doth many times naturally take hisdream for a vision, as not having well observed his own slumbering(Hobbes 1651, 32.6)

This does not rule out the possibility that God might indeedcommunicate directly with an individual by means of a vision. But itdoes rule out other people sensibly believing reports of suchoccurrences, for the events reported are easily (and usually if notnecessarily always correctly) given a natural explanation as dreams,which themselves have natural causes.

Hobbes takes a similarly sceptical attitude to reports of miracles.Chapter 37 ofLeviathan is a discussion of this topic,centred on Hobbes’s definition of a miracle as “a workof God (besides his operation by the way of nature, ordainedin the creation),done for the making manifest to his electthe mission of an extraordinary minister for theirsalvation” (Hobbes 1651, 37.7). Though there is somedispute about exactly what Hobbes is doing there, there clearly is agood deal of talk about “false” or “pretended”miracles, with an emphasis on the possibility of trickery, and awarning about believing too hastily in reports of miracles. Theconclusion is weaker than that of Hume’s more famous argumentabout the evidence for belief in miracles, but a similar scepticalattitude is present.

The case has often been made, however, that Hobbes was not justsomewhat sceptical about some religious claims, but actually deniedthe existence of God. The idea is that, though Hobbes says that Godexists, those statements are just cover for his atheism. Moreover,these interpreters claim, there are various pieces of evidence thatpoint to this hidden underlying view. Opinions differ on what thecrucial evidence of the hidden atheism is. Jesseph (2002), forinstance, argues that Hobbes’s claims about a material God donot add up. Curley (1992) argues that Hobbes’s discussions ofprophecy and miracles, taken together, contain a suggestiveproblem.

There is (what I would take to be) a fairly obvious problem ofcircularity here: in the chapter on miracles we are to judge theauthenticity of a miracle by the authenticity of the doctrine it isused to support, but in the chapter on prophecy we had to judge theprophet’s claim to be God’s spokesman by his performanceof miracles. If Hobbes is aware of this circularity, he does not callattention to it. Perhaps he just did not notice it. Perhaps, asStrauss might have suggested, he leaves it to the reader to discoverthis for himself. (Curley 1992, §5).

There are some tricky general methodological questions here, aboutwhen we can reasonably say that an author is trying to communicate aview other than the one apparently stated. Note, however, that forsomeone allegedly covering up his atheism to avoid controversy, Hobbestook the curious approach of saying many other intensely controversialthings. He was opposed to free will and to immaterial souls, opposedto Presbyterianism and to Roman Catholicism, and managed to haveanti-royalists thinking he was a royalist, but at least one prominentroyalist (Clarendon) thinking he supported Cromwell. This was not arecipe for a quiet life. One might see Hobbes as thinking that thesethings could be said with controversy, but God’s existence onlydenied with genuine danger. But one needs, at least, a fairly complexstory about Hobbes’s attitudes in order to sustain the view thathe was sneakily suggesting that God didn’t exist.

6. Reception

Hobbes was a widely read and controversial author. In many cases, thediscussion of his philosophy was about his political philosophy(Goldie 1994, Malcolm 2002). However, Hobbes’s non-politicalviews were also discussed. The Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, forexample, devoted considerable energy to arguing against Hobbesianatheism and materialism. Cudworth’s Cambridge colleague HenryMore was also a critic of Hobbes. Margaret Cavendish, meanwhile,reacted to Hobbes’s work and developed her own non-Hobbesianmaterialism.

One important connection is that between Hobbes’s work andLeibniz’s. Of all the canonical philosophers in the period fromDescartes to Kant, Leibniz is probably the one who paid most attentionto Hobbes’s work, and had the most to say about differentaspects of it. Leibniz found Hobbes’s work worthy of seriousengagement, but ultimately also thought it mistaken in many ways. Onthe other hand, later empiricist philosophers, in particular Locke andHume, develop several Hobbesian themes. Indeed, one might well speakof Hobbes, not Locke, as the first of the British empiricists.

The best known parts of Leibniz’s interaction with Hobbes arefrom early in Leibniz’s philosophical career, before 1686, theyear in which Leibniz wrote his ‘Discourse on Metaphysics’(Bernstein 1980; Jesseph 1998; Moll 1996, 103–36; Wilson 1997).His criticism of Hobbes’s nominalism, and his early adoption ofthe view that reasoning is computation, were both discussed above.Leibniz also paid a good deal of attention to Hobbes’s viewsabout motion, in particular those aboutconatus or endeavour,which have application both to physics and to mathematics. And Leibniztwice in the 1670s wrote letters to Hobbes, though it is unclear ifHobbes ever received them, and there is no evidence of any replies.Leibniz continued, moreover, to engage with Hobbes’s workthroughout his philosophical career, even if that engagement was neverquite as intense as it was in a brief early period. There is, forinstance, a discussion of Hobbes’s views in the 1709Theodicy.

Looking beyond Leibniz, we can see some close connections between thework of Hobbes and that of Locke and Hume, both of whom were wellaware of Hobbes’s views. Locke’s connections to Hobbes,though perhaps not obvious, are there (Rogers 1988). Think ofLocke’s empiricism (i.e., anti-nativism), his attention tolanguage and its workings and related errors, his granting at leastthe possibility of materialism being true, and his scepticism aboutrevelation. Hume, meanwhile, begins hisTreatise with hisview about ideas being less intense copies of our sensations, a viewwith a close resemblance to Hobbes’s view about decaying sense.Russell (1985; 2008) argues convincingly that Hume modelled thestructure of theTreatise on that of Hobbes’sElements of Law. And Hume, like Hobbes, combines apparentacceptance of a basic cosmological argument with scepticism about manyreligious claims. Indeed there are enough connections that it’splausible to speak of “the empiricism of Hobbes…,Locke…, and Hume” (Nidditch 1975, viii), rather than ofthe more conventional trio of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

Bibliography

Though the vast majority of work on Hobbes looks at his politicalphilosophy, there are general books on Hobbes that look at hisnon-political philosophy, such as Sorell 1986 and Martinich 2005. Thebest modern biography is Martinich 1999.

References toThe Elements of Law,Leviathan, andDe Corpore are by chapter and paragraph number. This shouldenable readers to find references in editions other than the ones usedhere (even though most editions ofLeviathan do not printparagraph numbers). All other references are given by volume and pagenumber. Most works are referred to using their author’s name andtheir date of first publication. A few others — Hobbes’sElements of Law andBehemoth, Aubrey’sBrief Lives, and some works of Leibniz — are referredto using their dates of composition, because they were publishedseveral years after they were written.

Primary Literature

• Aubrey, J., 1696,Brief Lives, in A. Clark (ed.),‘Brief Lives’, Chiefly of Contemporaries, set down byJohn Aubrey, between the years 1669 & 1696, Oxford:Clarendon, 1898.
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• Descartes, R., 1641b, Letter to Marin Mersenne for Hobbes, in N.Malcolm (ed.),The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, Oxford:Oxford University Press, 1998, 94–101
• Descartes, R., 1643, Letter to Father ****, in J. Cottingham, R.Stoothoff, and D. Murdoch (eds.),The Philosophical Writings ofDescartes, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984,3.230–1
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• Episode 359 of Peter Adamson’s History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps podcast,There and Back Again: Zabarella on Scientific Method provides an accessible introduction to the topic.

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