| Phi 109-01 Fall 2015 |
|
(Site navigation is not working.) |
Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) was eight years older than Descartes, but he came to philosophy later in his life, and the works you will read selections from date from the decade after Descartes’ death (when Hobbes was in his 60s).
• The first group of selections are from Hobbes’ best-known work, Leviathan. That is a treatise on political theory, but the selections we will discuss come from its introductory sections in which Hobbes discusses broader issues regarding human nature. Although these sections are an introduction to the discussion of politics in the work they are drawn from, they will serve us also as a introduction to the second group of selections that we will discuss since they cover a similar range of ideas in less detail.
• The selections in the second group are from Hobbes’ De Corpore. That is the title of the original Latin work, but you will read selections from an English version that Hobbes published shortly after it. The full title of the English version was Elements of Philosophy. First section, concerning Body, and ‘Body’ here means not merely human or animal bodies but the physical world. Indeed we will discuss selections that are drawn from a chapter that follows one on optics (“Of Refraction and Reflection”) and is the first chapter of part IV of the work, titled “Of Physics or the Phenomena of Nature,” in which it is followed by a chapter “Of the World and of the Stars.”
Hobbes may at first sound no more materialist than Descartes since much of what you've read from Descartes concerns the mechanical operation of the human body. But remember that, for Descartes, the human mind has a very different character and is indeed a different kind of substance. For Hobbes, on the other hand, everything is material (and he eventually claimed that this included God). This difference from Descartes may come out most clearly in the last paragraph of the selections from De Corpore, where Hobbes discusses thought, the feature of the human mind that animals and other machines must lack according to Descartes.
If the chief problem for Descartes is forging a tie between the mind and body (so the mind is not merely a captain on a ship or a ghost in a machine), what seems to you to be the chief problem that Hobbes faces? Or, to put it another way, what seems to be the weakest point of his materialist account of sensation and thought?