Galileo, Hobbes, and the book of nature

Perspectives on Science 12 (2):191-211 (2004)
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Abstract

: This paper investigates the influence of Galileo's natural philosophy on the philosophical and methodological doctrines of Thomas Hobbes. In particular, I argue that what Hobbes took away from his encounter with Galileo was the fundamental idea that the world is a mechanical system in which everything can be understood in terms of mathematically-specifiable laws of motion. After tracing the history of Hobbes's encounters with Galilean science (through the "Welbeck group" connected with William Cavendish, earl of Newcastle and the "Mersenne circle" in Paris), I argue that Hobbes's 1655 treatise De Corpore is deeply indebted to Galileo. More specifically, I show that Hobbes's mechanistic theory of mind owes a significant debt to Galileo while his treatment of the geometry of parabolic figures in chapter 16 of De Corpore was taken almost straight out of the account of accelerated motion Two New Sciences

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Douglas Jesseph
University of South Florida

Citations of this work

Principles of Motion and the Absence of Laws of Nature in Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy.Stathis Psillos & Eirini Goudarouli - 2019 - Hopos: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 9 (1):93-119.
Optics in Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy.Franco Giudice - 2016 - Hobbes Studies 29 (1):86-102.
Self‐Knowledge and Knowledge of Mankind in Hobbes' Leviathan.Ursula Renz - 2018 - European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1):4-29.

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References found in this work

Hobbes and the School of Padua: two incompatible approaches of science.Jan Prins - 1990 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 72 (1):26-46.
The meaning of demonstration in Hobbes science.Donald W. Hanson - 1990 - History of Political Thought 11 (4):587-626.

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