A New History of Western Philosophy by Anthony Kenny

Author:Anthony Kenny [Kenny, Anthony]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Clarendon Press
Published: 2010-04-28T23:00:00+00:00

Hobbes

Of those who had been invited to comment on Descartes’ Meditations in 1641, the most distinguished was Thomas Hobbes, the foremost English philosopher of the age. At that time Hobbes was fifty-three years old, having been born in 1588, the year of the Spanish Armada. He had been educated at Oxford and had served as a tutor to the Cavendish family and as an amanuensis to Francis Bacon. In 1629 he had published an English translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War. During a visit to Paris in the 1630s he had met Descartes’ Franciscan friend Marin Mersenne, whom he described as ‘an outstanding exponent of all branches of philosophy’. In 1640 he had written a treatise in English, Elements of Law, Natural and Political, which contained in essence the principles of his philosophy of human nature and human society. He fled in the same year to Paris, anticipating the Civil War which was heralded by the activities of the Long Parliament. He remained there more than ten years, and was, for a period, tutor to the exiled heir to the throne, the future King Charles II. In 1642 he presented a number of the ideas of the Elements of Law in a Latin treatise, De Cive, which established his reputation in France.

Hobbes’ comments on Descartes show little comprehension of the Meditations, and the two thinkers have traditionally been regarded as standing at opposite poles of philosophy. In fact they resembled each other in several ways. Both, for instance, were fired by a passion for mathematics. Hobbes’ most lively biographer, the gossipy John Aubrey, described his first encounter with geometry:

He was 40 years old before he looked on geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman’s library, Euclid’s Elements lay open, and ’twas the 47th Element at Book I. He read the proposition. ‘By G—’ said he, ‘this is impossible!’ So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. Et sic deinceps[and so on], that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that truth. This made him in love with geometry. (Aubrey 1975: 158)

He did not, however, grasp the importance of Descartes’ analytic geometry, which he thought ‘lacked bite’. He thought even more poorly of his philosophy, in particular his physics or natural philosophy. ‘Mr Hobbes was wont to say,’ Aubrey tells us, ‘that had Des Cartes kept himself wholly to Geometrie that he had been the best Geometer in the world, but that his head did not lye for Philosophy.’ There is an irony here. When, later in life, Hobbes betook himself to the serious study of geometry, he wasted years debating with the mathematical professors of Oxford in a futile attempt to square the circle.

Descartes and Hobbes had much in common. They shared a contempt for Aristotle and the Aristotelian establishment in the universities. Both were solitary thinkers who spent significant parts of their lives in exile—each, for a time, beholden to banished Stuart courts. Both of them had very modest libraries, and were contemptuous of book-learning.

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