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New collection of essays: A Companion to Hobbes

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Adams, Marcus P. (ed.) (2021): A Companion to Hobbes. (Blackwell Companions to Philosophy). John Wiley & Sons.

Chapters

New Book: Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law by Kody W. Cooper (University of Notre Dame Press)

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Kody W. Cooper (2018): Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law (University of Notre Dame Press)

Description

Has Hobbesian moral and political theory been fundamentally misinterpreted by most of his readers? Since the criticism of John Bramhall, Hobbes has generally been regarded as advancing a moral and political theory that is antithetical to classical natural law theory. Kody Cooper challenges this traditional interpretation of Hobbes in Thomas Hobbes and the Natural Law. Hobbes affirms two essential theses of classical natural law theory: the capacity of practical reason to grasp intelligible goods or reasons for action and the legally binding character of the practical requirements essential to the pursuit of human flourishing. Hobbes’s novel contribution lies principally in his formulation of a thin theory of the good. This book seeks to prove that Hobbes has more in common with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of natural law philosophy than has been recognized. According to Cooper, Hobbes affirms a realistic philosophy as well as biblical revelation as the ground of his philosophical-theological anthropology and his moral and civil science. In addition, Cooper contends that Hobbes’s thought, although transformative in important ways, also has important structural continuities with the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition of practical reason, theology, social ontology, and law. What emerges from this study is a nuanced assessment of Hobbes’s place in the natural law tradition as a formulator of natural law liberalism. This book will appeal to political theorists and philosophers and be of particular interest to Hobbes scholars and natural law theorists.

Table of contents

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Introduction
  • The foundations of Hobbes’s natural law philosophy
  • Hobbesian moral and civil science : rereading the doctrine of severability
  • Hobbes and the good of life
  • The legal character of the laws of nature
  • The essence of Leviathan : the person of the commonwealth and the common good
  • Hobbes’s natural law account of civil law
  • Conclusion
  • Notes
  • Index

Article: Hobbes on Natural Philosophy as “True Physics” and Mixed Mathematics

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Marcus P. Adams, ‘Hobbes on Natural Philosophy as “True Physics” and Mixed Mathematics’, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, 56 (2016).

Abstract: In this paper, I offer an alternative account of the relationship of Hobbesian geometry to natural philosophy by arguing that mixed mathematics provided Hobbes with a model for thinking about it. In mixed mathematics, one may borrow causal principles from one science and use them in another science without there being a deductive relationship between those two sciences. Natural philosophy for Hobbes is mixed because an explanation may combine observations from experience (the ‘that’) with causal principles from geometry (the ‘why’). My argument shows that Hobbesian natural philosophy relies upon suppositions that bodies plausibly behave according to these borrowed causal principles from geometry, acknowledging that bodies in the world may not actually behave this way. First, I consider Hobbes’s relation to Aristotelian mixed mathematics and to Isaac Barrow’s broadening of mixed mathematics in Mathematical Lectures(1683). I show that for Hobbes maker’s knowledge from geometry provides the ‘why’ in mixed-mathematical explanations. Next, I examine two explanations from De corporePart IV: (1) the explanation of sense in De corpore 25.1-2; and (2) the explanation of the swelling of parts of the body when they become warm in De corpore 27.3. In both explanations, I show Hobbes borrowing and citing geometrical principles and mixing these principles with appeals to experience.