This paper explores Thomas Hobbes’s account of animal life and mind. After a critical examination of Hobbes’s mechanistic explanation of operations of the mind such as perception and memory, I argue that his theory derives its strength from his idea of the dynamic interaction of the body with its surroundings. This dynamic interaction allows Hobbes to maintain that the purposive disposition of the animal is not merely an upshot of its material configuration, but an expression of its distinctive bodily history. (...) In support of Hobbes, I show how this is complemented by his account of the unity and continuity of the animal body in terms of a unification through the self-preserving drive that originates in perception. Nonetheless, I argue that Hobbes’s philosophy of animal life and mental faculties is hindered by a kind of epiphenomenalist perspective that is embedded in his materialist framework, and this perspective leaves the status of ideas and mental content unclear. I explain why Hobbes’s dynamic theory, founded upon the reciprocal determination of moving bodies, supports his idea of animal development and habituation while failing to account for the reflexivity of the mind. (shrink)

Accounts of Hobbes’s ‘system’ of sciences oscillate between two extremes. On one extreme, the system is portrayed as wholly axiomtic-deductive, with statecraft being deduced in an unbroken chain from the principles of logic and first philosophy. On the other, it is portrayed as rife with conceptual cracks and fissures, with Hobbes’s statements about its deductive structure amounting to mere window-dressing. This paper argues that a middle way is found by conceiving of Hobbes’s _Elements of Philosophy_ on the model of a (...) mixed-mathematical science, not the model provided by Euclid’s _Elements of Geometry_. I suggest that Hobbes is a test case for understanding early-modern system-construction more generally, as inspired by the structure of the applied mathematical sciences. This approach has the additional virtue of bolstering, in a novel way, the thesis that the transformation of philosophy in the long seventeenth century was heavily indebted to mathematics, a thesis that has increasingly come under attack in recent years. (shrink)