Thomas Hobbes

:This article is about the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. For information on the Bill Watterson comic strip featuring a tiger named Hobbes, see Calvin and Hobbes.

In Paris

Hobbes's first area of study was an interest in the physical doctrine of motion. Despite his interest in this phenomenon, he disdained experimental work as in physics. He went on to conceive the system of thought to the elaboration of which he would devote his life. His scheme was first to work out, in a separate treatise, a systematic doctrine of body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, at least as motion or mechanical action was then understood. He then singled out Man from the realm of Nature. Then, in another treatise, he showed what specific bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation, knowledge, affections and passions whereby Man came into relation with Man. Finally he considered, in his crowning treatise, how Men were moved to enter into society, and argued how this must be regulated if Men were not to fall back into "brutishness and misery". Thus he proposed to unite the separate phenomena of Body, Man and the State.

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Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country riven with discontent which disrupted him from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. However, by the time of the Short Parliament he had written not only his Human Nature but also De corpore politico, which were published together ten years later as The Elements of Law. This means his initial political doctrine was not shaped by the English Civil War.

Related Topics:
Short Parliament - Human Nature - De corpore politico - English Civil War

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When in November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded to the Short, Hobbes felt he was a marked man by the circulation of his treatise and fled to Paris. He did not return for eleven years. In Paris he rejoined the coterie about Mersenne, and wrote a critique of the Meditations on First Philosophy of Descartes, which was printed as third among the sets of "Objections" appended, with "Replies" from Descartes in 1641. A different set of remarks on other works by Descartes succeeded only in ending all correspondence between the two.

Related Topics:
Long Parliament - Meditations on First Philosophy - Descartes

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He also extended his own works a little, working on the third section, De Cive, which was finished in November 1641. Although it was initially only circulated privately, it was well received. He then returned to hard work on the first two sections of his work and published little except for a short treatise on optics (Tractatus opticus) included in the collection of scientific tracts published by Mersenne as Cogitata physico-mathematica in 1644. He built a good reputation in philosophic circles and in 1645 was chosen with Descartes, Gilles de Roberval and others, to referee the controversy between John Pell and Longomontanus over that problem of squaring the circle.

Related Topics:
De Cive - 1641 - 1644 - 1645 - Gilles de Roberval - John Pell - Longomontanus - Squaring the circle

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