Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Hobbes’ Philosophy of Science

First published Fri Mar 8, 2019

Thomas Hobbes is rightly regarded as a monumental figure in the

history of philosophy, especially for his
masterpiece
Leviathan (1651 in English; 1668 in Latin). The scholarly
literature on Leviathan is voluminous
and has been especially
focused upon issues in political philosophy, such as representation
and authorization,
sovereignty and absolutism, contracts and
covenants, and the relationship of civil authority to religion,
among
others. Since its printing the portrayal in Leviathan XIII of
humans in their natural state—an
existence that is
“solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”—has
struck the imagination of many of Hobbes’
readers, leaving many
seeing Hobbes as pessimistic at best or hopelessly unrealistic at
worst.

In Hobbes’ own time, however, he was also well-known, even if

sometimes ridiculed, for his views in
mathematics, natural philosophy,
and optics. In A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques
(1646), Hobbes’
own assessment of his work is laudatory:

…I shall deserve the Reputation of having been the first to lay

the ground of two Sciences, this
of Opticques, the most curious, and
that other of natural Justice, which I have done in my book
de Cive,
the most profitable of all other. (Hobbes 1646 [1983: 622])

Although some contemporaries saw promise in Hobbes’ optics, such

as Mersenne, who published Hobbes’
work in this area in 1644 in
Ballistica, in the years following the publication of
Leviathan Hobbes’ pursuits
apart from political
philosophy were taken less seriously. There are a number of possible
explanations for
this decline in the opinion of Hobbes’
competence in these areas, including his numerous attempts to square
the circle, the association of his views with atheism by many critics,
and the conflicts he had with Robert
Boyle at the time of the rise of
experimental philosophy. These all contributed to some extent to
Hobbes’
exclusion from the Royal Society when it was
founded.

If Hobbes’ mathematical and natural-philosophical endeavors

failed to be taken seriously by his
contemporaries near the end of his
life, what purpose is served by understanding these failed
attempts?[1]
Apart from interest in them on their own terms as episodes in the
history of science and philosophy, there are
several reasons why we
may find these areas of Hobbes’ thought valuable for study.
First, Hobbes himself
understood his political philosophy, or as he
called it “civil philosophy”, to be a science capable of
demonstration. Thus, understanding his general views about the nature
of scientific demonstration promises
to shed light on the way in which
he saw civil philosophy as scientific. Second, Hobbes understood
natural-
philosophical explanations in physics as needing to make use
of mathematical principles to count, as he says,
as “true
physics”. This may seem like a banal claim to a twenty-first
century reader, but it was not so to many
in the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries. Hobbes’ natural philosophy thus situates
him within the shift from
qualitative to quantitative physics. Third,
Hobbes’ conflicts with the Royal Society show us not only his
views of the role of experimentation but also contextualize the rise
of experimentalism. After discussing
Hobbes’ criteria for
scientific knowledge, this entry will address each of these three
areas.

1. The Criteria for Scientific Knowledge

2. The Use of Mathematics and Hypotheses in Scientific Explanations
3. Hobbes on Experimentation: Conflict with Robert Boyle and the Royal Society
4. The Prospects for a Science of Civil Philosophy
Bibliography
Primary Literature Works by Hobbes
Secondary Literature
Academic Tools
Other Internet Resources
Related Entries
1. The Criteria for Scientific Knowledge
The fundamental aspects of Hobbes’ materialism are well known.
Hobbes believed that everything that exists
is a body, and that bodies
are sometimes in motion and sometimes at rest. Furthermore, he held
that the only
essential property of body is extension, or magnitude.
All other apparent properties of bodies, such as those
of color,
taste, and firmness, are the result of motions from bodies being
continued through media to humans’
sense organs. These motions,
when continued into the bodies of perceivers, are constitutive of
conceptions,
or
ideas.[2]
Ideas of the objects of sense are caused by motions from things
outside of perceivers and those
continued motions constitute ideas and
serve to individuate one idea from another. Thus, all ideas in the
human mind are either from sense perception or derived from ideas
gained from sense perception (Leviathan
I; LEV 22).

This account of the origin and nature of ideas shows Hobbes’

clear empiricist leanings; however, Hobbes
does not hold that knowers
should uncritically accept what the ideas of sense objects seem to
represent. Like
many other philosophers in the seventeenth century,
Hobbes held that our knowledge of the external world
was not direct
but was instead mediated by ideas. This recognition that “we
compute nothing but our
phantasms or ideas” (Hobbes
1642–43 [1973: 450]; cf. OL
I.82)[3]
resulted in two worries about human
knowledge.

First, knowers must examine what resemblance ideas in the mind have to
objects in the outside world. This
worry seems similar, at first
glance, to the concerns of Descartes’ meditator in the
Meditations on First
Philosophy (1641), but Hobbes aimed to
provide a solution that made no reference whatsoever to God or to
anything at all immaterial, such as a soul. In the early work
Elements of Law, composed in 1640 and
published in 1650 (EL),
Hobbes offered arguments that attempted to show that ideas are
distinct from that
which they purport to represent and he claimed that
as a result we could know that the so-called secondary
qualities, such
as color, taste, and sound, were not in bodies. To do this, he used
everyday experience to
provide evidence for his claims:

Every man hath so much experience as to have seen the sun and other
visible objects by
reflection in the water and in glasses, and this
alone is sufficient for this conclusion: that colour
and image may be
there where the thing seen is not. (Elements of Law II.5; EL
3)

He used similar considerations in Leviathan I, concluding

that we can know, for example, that color and
sound are not in bodies
since if they were “they could not bee severed from them, as by
glasses, and in
Ecchoes by reflection” (LEV 24).

A second worry that follows from Hobbes’ view that we have only
mediated access to bodies in the world
relates to the possibility of
gaining knowledge of the causes of natural events. Most of the ideas
that knowers
possess of bodies are received passively. When interested
in the cause of some phenomenon, all one may
examine are ideas caused
by the motions of the bodies involved. However, when interested in,
say, the cause
of billiard ball B being put into motion after
apparent contact with moving billiard ball A, one does not find
an idea of A being the cause of B’s motion. Even
if one were to look to a lower ‘level’, as it were,
smaller
than billiard balls by use of a microscope, one would not find
any idea of A’s motion causing B’s motion.
Hobbes
diagnosed this lack of causal knowledge by highlighting that human
agents are not the makers of
natural phenomena. He seemed to think
that makers gain this causal knowledge by attending to their
constructions through the process of creating. Since we lack the ideas
of the causes of individual phenomena
from our experience, Hobbes
claimed that we cannot know their actual causes at all. All that we
may know
are possible causes. Hobbes asserted in Six Lessons to
the Professors of Mathematiques (1656) that because
“of
natural bodies we know not the construction but seek it from the
effects” we can know “only of what [the
causes] may
be” (EW VII.184).

This second worry brings to the fore Hobbes’ condition for the
possibility of scientific knowledge, namely,
the possession of
(actual) causal knowledge. He claimed that

we are said to know [scire] some effect when we know what its
causes are, in what subject they
are, in what subject they introduce
the effect and how they do it. Therefore, this is the
knowledge
[scientia] τοῦ
διότι or of causes. (OL I.59)
Having scientific knowledge required one to know the actual causes of
a phenomenon, not its mere possible
causes. However, the only way to
possess such causal knowledge is to act as a maker, as God did in the
case
of natural things.

This restriction that Hobbes made allowed him to consider only

geometry and civil philosophy as bodies of
scientific knowledge, since
in only these two disciplines do humans make the objects that they
study. In Six
Lessons to the Professors of Mathematiques,
Hobbes distinguished these two disciplines from all others by
connecting them to making:

Geometry therefore is demonstrable for the lines and figures from

which we reason are drawn
and described by ourselves and civil
philosophy is demonstrable because we make the
commonwealth ourselves.
(EW VII.184)

In the three following sections, this entry will consider ways in

which these two bodies of scientific
knowledge are used within other
disciplines to provide an epistemic grounding for the explanations
therein.
In natural philosophy, or physics, Hobbes borrowed
geometrical principles to provide the cause—the reason
‘why’—for many phenomena, while the making of the
commonwealth, and its laws, out of the state of nature
was the genesis
of civil philosophy.

2. The Use of Mathematics and Hypotheses in Scientific

Explanations
There has been debate among scholars of Hobbes’ thought about
the relationship of the different parts of his
philosophy to one
another. Much of the focus has been upon the methodological statements
in Part I of De
Corpore, and scholars have traditionally
divided over whether Hobbes understood philosophy as unified or
disunified. However, more recent scholarship has drawn attention to
Hobbes’ practice of explanation, such as
the explanations found
in De Corpore Part IV, and has argued that aspects of both
the unified and disunified
views track Hobbes’ discussions and
practice while those views on their own miss that Hobbes explicitly
borrowed principles from mathematics to use in natural philosophy (and
provided citations to show this
activity). This section will discuss
these three approaches to understanding how the parts of Hobbes’
system
fit with one another and then provide an example of an
explanation in Hobbes’ natural philosophy from De
Corpore XXV.

First, the unified view. A significant number of scholars have argued

that Hobbes understood his philosophy
as unified by deductive
connections between the different parts (for example, Martinich 2005;
Peters 1967;
Shapin & Schaffer 1985; Watkins 1965). A stronger
version of this unified view understands Hobbes to be a
type of
reductionist, wherein descriptions of macroscopic bodies, such as
humans and rocks, ultimately
reduce to microscopic bodies responsible
for all phenomena (for example, Hampton 1986; Ryan 1970). For
example, Alan
Ryan articulates the reductionist view as follows:

Hobbes believed as firmly as one could that all behaviour, whether of

animate or inanimate
matter, was ultimately to be explained in terms
of particulate motion: the laws governing the
motions of discrete
material particles were the ultimate laws of the universe, and in this
sense
psychology must be rooted in physiology and physiology in
physics, while the social sciences,
especially the technology of
statecraft, must be rooted in psychology. (1970: 102–103)

There is some textual support for understanding the parts of

Hobbes’ system as either deductively or
reductively linked
together since he did at times talk of the parts of philosophy as
beginning in first
philosophy and leading from one to another. For
example, he asserted in De Corpore VI.6 that by beginning
at
first principles, one will move from first philosophy to geometry, and
from geometry to physics. He
continued by claiming that “after
physics we come to morals” and, indeed, Hobbes claims that moral
philosophy must be studied after physics because the passions have
“their causes in sense-experience and
imagination” (CSL
299; OL I.64).

However, immediately following these statements that seem to indicate

that Hobbes took his philosophy to
be tightly knit together, he argued
that “civil and moral philosophy do not so adhere to one
another, but that
they may be severed” (EW I.73). This
separation is permissible, Hobbes claimed, because in addition to
learning moral philosophy from first principles each individual could
simply study the motions of their own
mind and gain knowledge of the
same principles. That such separation could occur is difficult to
explain for
a strong version of the unified view because it makes
it appear that Hobbes thought that one could develop
civil philosophy
simply by introspecting, entirely independently of any work in moral
philosophy, natural
philosophy, and first philosophy.

A further difficulty for the unified view is that even if Hobbes did
see the connection between, say, physics
and moral philosophy as
deductive, it is not obvious how that deduction would work because
moral
philosophy must add content about human passions (endeavors)
that is not contained within—and thus not
deducible
from—physics. For example, although the concept
‘endeavor’ is introduced in physics, for it to be
used in
moral philosophy the concepts of ‘appetite’ and
‘aversion’, which are properties of human bodies,
must be
added to it for use (Malcolm 2002: 147). One way to avoid this
difficulty for the unified view would
be to provide evidence that
Hobbes made explicit the reduction relationship between concepts like
‘appetite’
and ‘aversion’ and the concept of
‘endeavour’, showing how one can reduce claims about human
bodies to
claims about microscopic bodies. Hobbes does not appear to
do this anywhere in the corpus. However, even
if a strong version of
the unified view faces this difficulty, the presence of
‘endeavor’ throughout Hobbes’
philosophy shows that
it was a foundational concept (see Jesseph 2016).

The second major view of the relationship of the parts of

Hobbes’ philosophy to one another is what we can
call the
disunified view (for example, see Robertson 1886; Taylor 1938;
Warrender 1957). Some of the
motivation behind the disunified account
seems to be a desire to free Hobbes from what is prima facie a case
of
deriving normative claims relating to the commonwealth in civil
philosophy from descriptive claims
related to human psychology and,
ultimately, more general claims in natural philosophy (especially
Taylor
1938). However, in its attempts to rescue Hobbes from a version
of the so-called naturalistic fallacy, the
disunified account fails to
take seriously Hobbes’ claims about the unity of his philosophy.
Furthermore, it
neglects that many of Hobbes’ contemporaries
(for example, Bramhall) saw Hobbes’ views in natural
philosophy
as having far-reaching consequences for other areas of philosophy.

A third view has more recently been offered that seeks to carve a
middle path between the unified and
disunified interpretations. We can
call this view the mixed-mathematics view (for example, Adams 2016,
2017; Biener 2016). This understanding of Hobbes’ system agrees
with the worry raised above for the
unified account that
‘higher’ levels, such as geometry, do not contain the
concepts used in ‘lower’ level
explanations. For example,
although geometrical principles are used in Hobbes’ optical
explanations those
geometrical principles do not contain concepts such
as ‘light’ or ‘color’. Some evidence for this
lack of
containment claim can be found on the well-known “Table
of the Several Subjects of Science” in Leviathan
IX.
The “sciences” on this table are listed on the right-most
section and their subjects are to the immediate
left. The subject of
the science of optics, for example, is all of the “consequences
from vision”, and these
stem from “Physics or consequences
from qualities”. The science of geometry, however, has as its
subject the
“consequences from quantity, and motion
determined… by figure” and these stem not from physics
but from
“consequences from the accidents common to all bodies
natural; which are quantity and motion”.

Instead of seeing this “adding to” as evidence for the

disunified view, the mixed-mathematics view
understands Hobbes having
seen certain disciplines as providing causal principles (what he
called the ‘why’)
while other disciplines provided the
facts relevant to a given domain (what he called the
‘that’). Textual
support for this understanding of
Hobbes’ system can be found in Hobbes’ methodological
statements about
natural philosophy as well as in his practice of
explanation.

As mentioned already, Hobbes identified scientific knowledge

(scientia) with knowing causes, and in his
discussions he
used language germane to Aristotle’s distinction between the
‘why’ and the ‘that’. We have
seen already
Hobbes’ commitment to knowing through the causes, but the
complete passage from De
Corpore VI.1 provides further detail
about Hobbes’ views on the two types of knowledge, as
follows:

We are said to know [scire] some effect when we know what its
causes are, in what subject they
are, in what subject they introduce
the effect and how they do it. Therefore, this is the
knowledge
[scientia] τοῦ
διότι or of causes. All other knowledge
[cognitio], which is called τοῦ
ὅτι, is either sense experience or imagination
remaining in sense experience or memory (De
Corpore VI.1; CSL
287–289).
Two types of knowledge thus emerge. There is knowledge from sense
experience, retained as imagination
and eventually as memory, and
there is scientific knowledge. When reflecting in De Homine
on the status of
claims in physics, Hobbes claims that what he calls
“true physics” must be a mixture of both of these types
of
knowledge:

[…] since one cannot proceed in reasoning about natural things

that are brought about by motion
from the effects to the causes
without a knowledge of those things that follow from that kind of
motion; and since one cannot proceed to the consequences of motions
without a knowledge of
quantity, which is geometry; nothing can be
demonstrated by physics without something also
being demonstrated
a priori. Therefore physics (I mean true physics) [vera
physica], that
depends on geometry, is usually numbered among the
mixed mathematics [mathematicas
mixtas]. [.] Therefore those
mathematics are pure which (like geometry and arithmetic) revolve
around quantities in the abstract so that work [in them] requires no
knowledge of the subject;
those mathematics are mixed, in truth, which
in their reasoning some quality of the subject is
also considered, as
is the case with astronomy, music, physics, and the parts of physics
that can
vary on account of the variety of species and the parts of
the universe. (MC 42; OL II.93)

These two statements concerning the status of different types of

knowledge and the requirement to mix
“quantities in the
abstract” with “some quality of the subject” in
physics can aid in making sense of Hobbes’
actual explanatory
practice. What does it mean for physics to be “mixed
mathematics”? For Hobbes it means
that for many explanations one
will first establish that some fact is the case by appealing to sense
experience,
but to give the reason why one must borrow a principle
from geometry.

At several places in De Corpore, Hobbes appears to carry out

the mixed-mathematics ideal by showing, with
a citation, that he used
a causal principle from geometry within an explanation that included
details about the
“quality of the subject”. For example,
in De Corpore XXV, the chapter with which Hobbes began Part
IV,
Hobbes appears to have done just this when he explained sensation.
In that explanation, he appealed both to
“qualities of the
subject”, such as the claim based upon experience that “we
may observe… that our
phantasms or ideas are not always the
same” (EW I.389), and by citing and using causal principles from
earlier in the work (see discussion of this explanation in Adams
2016).[4]

Such behavior—borrowing and citing a principle within an

explanation—would be difficult to explain on the
picture offered
by the unified view since Hobbes offers no justification for this
practice other than phrases
such as “I have shown
besides…”. There is no deduction anywhere offered within
Hobbes’ actual
explanatory practice that would give reason to
think that Hobbes understood the use of these principles from
elsewhere in the work in that way. Likewise, it is difficult to make
sense of this activity within Hobbes’
actual practice if we
adopt the disunified view of Hobbes’ philosophy, since by using
principles from
elsewhere in the system, and especially by explicitly
citing them, Hobbes is signaling that the parts of his
system did fit
together, even if not in the strong reductive sense of the unified
view. The next section will
describe Hobbes’ view that work in
first philosophy and geometry must be done prior to experiments.

3. Hobbes on Experimentation: Conflict with Robert Boyle and the

Royal Society
Hobbes’ conflict with Robert Boyle concerning the nature of
natural philosophy in general, and the air-pump
experiments in
particular, took place over several years and in a series of
publications.[5]
Hobbes wrote
Dialogus Physicus (1661; a second version
appeared in
1668)[6]
as a dialogue aimed at criticizing Boyle’s
New Experiments
Physico-Mechanical (1660). Boyle responded to various criticisms
in works such as An
Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes his Dialogus Physicus
de Natura Aëris (1662), An Examen of Mr. Hobbes’
Doctrine about Cold (1665), and Animadversions upon Mr.
Hobbes’ Problemata de Vacuo (1674). The most
comprehensive
and influential treatment of this period of Hobbes’ life is
Shapin and Schaffer’s Leviathan
and the Air-Pump
(1985).[7]
This section will focus upon Hobbes’ criticisms of the air-pump
experiments in
the Dialogus Physicus with an aim of showing
how they illuminate our understanding of Hobbes’ natural
philosophy.
Most generally both Boyle and Hobbes viewed the natural world as
composed of bits of matter in motion.
Even if there were some points
of agreement between the versions of mechanical philosophy offered by
both
Boyle and
Hobbes,[8]
there are important differences. A crucial difference between the two
relates to the
status (or lack thereof) of Laws of Nature. While Boyle
talked about the laws of nature as established by God
(see entry on
Boyle, section Laws of Nature),
Hobbes restricted discussion of laws to the laws of human
conduct
discovered by those who escape the state of nature and create a
commonwealth. In contrast to laws
of the natural world, Hobbes
articulated a priori principles of motion at the foundation
of his physics in De
Corpore VIII.19 and IX.7. Rather than
being known as laws of motion, issued by some divine lawmaker,
these
Hobbesian principles of motion are explicated by thought experiments
and seem to rely upon a version
of the principle of sufficient reason
(Jesseph 2006: 132). Although Hobbes held that they were true of all
human experience, since Hobbes holds that we cannot know the actual
causes of natural phenomena he
would have to admit that nature might,
unbeknownst to us, act otherwise. However, despite these differences,
the primary dissimilarity that emerges between Hobbes and Boyle
concerning the air-pump experiments is
one of method as it relates to
the status of experiments/experience (see entry on
Boyle, section Philosophy of
Experiment).

Given that Hobbes was convinced of the impossibility of knowing the

actual causes of natural phenomena,
he held that any phenomenon admits
of multiple possible explanations. This should not be taken to imply
that Hobbes saw all explanations, and thus all possible causes or
suppositions, as standing on equal footing.
Instead, Hobbes held that
work in first philosophy and geometry must be completed prior to
attempting to
make any explanations in natural philosophy. This seems
to be what Hobbes meant when he said that
“nothing can be
demonstrated by physics without something also being demonstrated
a priori” (MC 42; OL
II.93). When giving an
explanation, Hobbes held that one should ideally appeal to those
causes that are
demonstrable from geometry when mixed with facts and
rule out those that are not intelligible according to
geometrical
principles.

In contrast, Boyle’s method prescribed that instead of bringing

causal principles to an experiment and
expecting to explain some
phenomenon by appeal to those principles, one should attempt to arrive
at a
supposition that would explain a phenomenon only after repeated,
careful experiments. Thomas Sprat
detailed the care taken in the design
of experiments and the manner in which Royal Society members were
formed into committees that shared parts of an experiment so that
“[b]y this union of eyes, and hands” they
were able to
gain “a full comprehension of the object in all its
appearances” (Sprat 1667: 85).

We can make sense of Hobbes’ direct criticisms of Boyle’s

prioritization of experiment with this
methodological difference in
mind. Hobbes’ view of the foundational role played by first
philosophy and
mathematics over experiment/experience is clear when he
claimed in Dialogus Physicus that

…ingenuity is one thing and method is another. Here method is

needed. The causes of those
things done by motion are to be
investigated through a knowledge of motion, the knowledge of
which,
the noblest part of geometry, is hitherto untouched. (DP 347; OL IV.236)

According to Hobbes, then, one must have geometrical principles

already in place to aid in choosing a
supposition before engaging in
experiments. Unlike the Royal Society’s aim to have multiple
members
examine the same object, Hobbes emphasized the need for
individual conceptual clarity, something that
could be accomplished
from an armchair.

This criticism from Hobbes, and Boyle’s rebuttals relying upon

evidence from experiments, could be seen as
a conflict of
Boyle’s experimental natural philosophy against a form of
speculative natural
philosophy.[9]
However, it is important to avoid taking Hobbes’ criticisms of
Boyle’s method to imply that Hobbes
completely eschewed
experiment/experience while engaging in natural-philosophical
explanations. Instead,
Hobbes viewed experiment/experience as playing
the role of establishing that some phenomenon occurs,
what we have
seen he called the ‘that’, but one should never hope,
according to Hobbes, to glean a possible
cause from mere observations,
even if those observations were carefully documented and repeated many
times.

Indeed, in the Dialogus Physicus Hobbes, speaking through

speaker A, often granted the observational
reports of the
experimenters without question. For example, speaker A does not
question what the
experimenters claim they observed regarding a
bladder that had been placed inside the air-pump and
weighed, noting
“They can be certain that the scale in which the bladder is, is
more depressed than the other,
their eyes bearing witness” (DP
369; OL IV.261). Instead of criticizing the experimenters’
reliance upon
observations, speaker A argues that the experimenters
cannot know, in the case of this explanation, what the
cause of the
scale being depressed is because their posited cause (the
“natural gravity” of the air) does not
allow them to
explain why the scale is depressed after the air-pump is engaged. In
contrast, speaker A offers
a possible cause that is borrowed, with an
explicit citation, from Hobbes’ geometrical account of
“simple
circle motion” and “fermentation”
developed in De Corpore 21.5 (Adams 2017).

4. The Prospects for a Science of Civil Philosophy

Hobbes thought that he would be renowned as the founder of civil
philosophy just as he saw Copernicus as
having initiated the
“beginning of astronomy”, Galileo as having opened the
“gate of natural philosophy
universal” with an account of
the “nature of motion”, and William Harvey as having first
discovered the
“science of man’s body” (see the
dedicatory epistle to De Corpore; EW I.viii). He asserted
that while
“Natural Philosophy is… young”, civil
philosophy itself is “no older than… [his] own book De
Cive” (EW
I.ix). As a student of historical texts in their
original
languages,[10]
Hobbes was well aware of many works
from antiquity to his own time
addressing issues relevant to civil philosophy. By claiming civil
philosophy
was his invention, he intended to deny that any of those
preceding works counted as philosophy.

What did Hobbes see as distinguishing his work in civil philosophy

from all predecessors? As points of
contrast, Hobbes mentioned the
Sophists who “taught … [only how] to dispute” and
Christian theologians
who introduced “school divinity”, by
which Hobbes meant the blending of teachings from Scripture with
Aristotle’s philosophy. For the latter, Hobbes saw the best
“exorcism” to be the distinction between the
subject
matters of religion, which were the “rules for honouring
God”, and philosophy, which was concerned
with the
“opinions of private men” (EW I.xi). What distinguished
religion from philosophy in this sense,
Hobbes continued, is that
philosophy provides either demonstrations from definitions or
demonstrations from
“suppositions not absurd”.

So far it seems that there are two criteria relevant to civil

philosophy that Hobbes saw as setting his apart
from all other
attempts. First, Hobbesian civil philosophy is a science
(scientia) because human makers have
the ability to know the
actual causes of the objects of study since they construct them.
Second, to count as
philosophy and not mere superstition or sophistry,
Hobbesian civil philosophy must provide demonstrations.

How exactly Hobbes’ use of ‘demonstration’ should be

understood as it relates to civil philosophy has been a
subject of
debate among Hobbes scholars over the past several decades. Much of
the focus of this debate has
been concerning the Laws of Nature in
Leviathan XIV and XV. Why restrict the scope of demonstrable
civil
philosophy to two chapters of Leviathan? Why not
include, for example, Leviathan Parts III (“Of A
Christian
Commonwealth”) and IV (“Of The Kingdom of
Darkness”)? Alternatively, why not also include chapters
from
Part II (“Of Commonwealth”), especially chapter XVII
(“Of the Causes, Generation, and Definition of
a
Commonwealth”)? One motivation for focus upon chapters XIV and
XV is that in those chapters Hobbes
seems to have indicated that he
saw a deductive relationship between the laws of nature by using the
language one might expect in a demonstration. For example, Hobbes
described the second law of nature as
being “derived from”
the first law (LEV 200). The remainder of this section will focus on
two ways of
understanding Hobbes’ civil philosophy as a
demonstration.

One way of understanding Hobbes’ claim that civil philosophy is

demonstrable connects it to Euclidean
geometry. This view has been
called the “definitivist” or “definitional”
view because of its emphasis on the
importance of definitions in
Hobbes’ philosophy. One articulation of the definitivist view
understands
Hobbes’ definition of ‘law of nature’ in
Leviathan as playing a role similar to an axiom in Euclidean
geometry (Deigh 1996). In Leviathan XIV, a law of nature is
defined as

a Precept, or generall Rule, found out by Reason, by which a man is

forbidden to do, that, which
is destructive of his life, or taketh
away the means of preserving the same; and to omit, that, by
which he
thinketh it may be best preserved. (LEV 198)

The definivist further claims that like Euclidean axioms Hobbes did
not view this axiom—the definition of
‘law of
nature’—as requiring demonstration; instead, he derived
the first law of nature from it and then
derived the others one from
another. Why is Hobbesian civil philosophy a demonstrable science on
this
view? Simply put, it is a demonstrable science because it follows
the method of Euclidean geometry, viewed
by Hobbes and others as the
model of scientific knowledge on account of its clarity and
rigor.[11]

A virtue of the definitivist view is that it takes seriously

Hobbes’ claim that civil philosophy is demonstrable.
However, a
difficulty faced by the definitivist view, along with any other that
understands Hobbes as drawing
inspiration from Euclid, is that Hobbes
himself harshly criticized Euclidean definitions, arguing that
Euclid’s
definitions “ought not be numbered among the
principles of geometry” because they did not contain the
causes
of what was to be constructed (EW VII.184). Furthermore, Hobbes
criticized the nature of the objects
of Euclidean geometry. For
example, Hobbes argued against understanding lines as being without
breadth
since there are no such bodies in nature (EW VII.202).
Additionally, Hobbes himself did not ground his own
geometry in
undemonstrated axioms and held that even Euclidean axioms needed to be
demonstrated (OL
I.72; OL I.119).

A second difficulty for the definitivist view lies in its inability to

accommodate the laws of nature as
commands (Hoekstra 2003: 115). If
the laws of nature were derived from the definition of ‘law of
nature’, it
would be difficult to see how they could then take
the form of instructions to perform some action. Indeed,
the laws of
nature take the form of instructions to do this or that, such as the
first law of nature

That every man, ought to endeavour Peace, as farre as he has of

obtaining it; and when he
cannot obtain it, that he may seek, and use,
all helps, and advantages of Warre. (LEV 200)

Beyond the first and second laws of nature, the remaining laws contain
instructions concerning what should
be done to accomplish peace, that
is, they command it, such as the third law of nature which commands
“That men performe their Covenants made” (LEV 220).

An alternative account, what has been called the “maker’s

knowledge” view of Hobbes’ civil philosophy,
attempts to
connect Hobbes’ demonstrations and definitions in geometry with
civil philosophy. This view
avoids the two difficulties faced by the
definitivist account mentioned above and holds that Hobbesian civil
philosophy is demonstrable by appealing to Hobbes’ own
understanding of what constitutes a demonstration
(Adams 2019). The
remainder of this section will discuss two features of the
“maker’s knowledge” account
of Hobbesian civil
philosophy.

First, a requirement for geometrical definitions, which Hobbes

stressed in multiple contexts, is that they must
provide the causes of
the things being defined. For example, Hobbes claimed that the
definition of ‘line’
should be as follows: “a line
is made by the motion of a point” (OL I.63). Likewise, a plane
is made by the
motion of a line. Perhaps Hobbes understood all of the
laws of nature to be like this type of geometrical
definition, but
instead of the definition of something like ‘line’ they
served as the definition of (and thus how
to make) peace. That is,
when following all of the laws of nature one could make peace just as
by following
the generative instructions contained in the definition
of ‘line’ one could make a line.

Second, a demonstration for Hobbes did not involve the derivation of

features by means of deduction. Such
deductions would provide one with
knowledge of what was already contained in the starting proposition,
making it difficult to see how commands could be derived from the
definition of ‘law of nature’ in Leviathan
XIV.
However, Hobbes explicitly said that demonstrations should be
synthetic, wherein one builds the
complex thing to be demonstrated out
of simpler constituent parts. A demonstration, Hobbes asserted, should
be understood as a showing of some construction to someone else (OL
I.76) and, as a result, he claimed that
“entire method of
demonstrating is synthetic” (OL I.71). By
‘synthesis’ Hobbes means that one shows how
something is
put together to reach the desired end, one shows how that thing is
made.

The maker’s knowledge view of Hobbes’ civil philosophy

draws insight from these two points and
understands Hobbesian civil
philosophy as demonstrable in the following way. Hobbes begins civil
philosophy at a starting point in the “natural condition”
of human bodies in Leviathan XIII, continues by
considering
how those bodies could be moved (by commands in the laws of nature) in
ways that would be
conducive of peace and, finally, are brought
together to compose the commonwealth.

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1642–43 [1973], Critique du de Mundo de Thomas
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