Hobbes: Philosophy of Mind

Many critics, Descartes himself included, have seen Hobbes as uncharitable or even incoherent in his Objections to the Meditations on First Philosophy. I argue that when understood within the wider context of his views of the late 1630s and early 1640s, Hobbes's Objections are coherent and reflect his goal of providing an epistemology consistent with a mechanical philosophy. I demonstrate the importance of this epistemology for understanding his Fourth Objection concerning the nature of the wax and contend that Hobbes's brief (...) claims in that Objection are best understood as a summary of the mechanism for scientific knowledge found in his broader work. Far from displaying his confusion, Hobbes's Fourth Objection in fact pinpoints a key weakness of Descartes's faculty psychology: its unintelligibility within a mechanical philosophy. (shrink)

Hobbes conception of reason as computation or reckoning is significantly different in Part I of De Corpore from what I take to be the later treatment in Leviathan. In the late actual computation with words starts with making an affirmation, framing a proposition. Reckoning then has to do with the consequences of propositions, or how they connect the facts, states of affairs or actions which they refer tor account. Starting from this it can be made clear how Hobbes understood the (...) crucial application of this conception to natural law, identified as 'right reason'. (shrink)

Hobbes and Hume on the imagination can initiate a discussion of empiricism in the 17th and 18th centuries: here, however, it provides the opportunity to focus on Kant's attempt to overcome the limits of their sense originating, naturalist ethics. I argue the general point that Kant's response to his predecessors, both empiricist and non-empiricists, is to modify their focus on nature without falling into skepticism; indeed, his speculative metaphysics also is a response to classical ontological metaphysics. Kant by providing two (...) realms or perspectives, a natural and a noumenal, avoids many difficulties resulting from Hobbes and Hume's starting point in sense leading to imagination and a non-normative reason. Yet, challenged by Herder and the romantics, he uses a sort of residual view of the imagination in relation to the freedom of the noumenal, which results in difficulties for his speculative, noumenal metaphysics. r 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved. (shrink)

How did the mechanical philosophy replace Aristotelianism as the philosophical "mainstream" in the seventeenth century? I look at this question by examining critiques of Aristotle in the first two systematic mechanical philosophers, Descartes and Hobbes, and how these critiques fit in with earlier Renaissance anti-Aristotelianism. ;I focus on Descartes's and Hobbes's accounts of the human soul, because this is where their critiques of Aristotle are most clear and where they also differ the most from each other. According to Aristotelian philosophers, (...) human beings, like other living beings, had both a body and a soul. The soul was the substantial form of the body, the thing that gave that body life and the activities of life. Since the Aristotelian account of the human soul had become associated with Christian doctrine concerning immortality, any new competing philosophical system would also have to address the human soul in this context. In Descartes's system there are two different kinds of substances, material substance or body, and immaterial substance or soul. He believed that the Aristotelian notion of "substantial form" derived from a corruption of the clear ideas of body and mind. ;For Hobbes, there are no immaterial things, neither the substantial forms of the Aristotelians nor the immaterial minds of Descartes. These are just meaningless words, instances of the error of "insignificant speech" which he believed to be the foundation of Aristotelianism. ;These different accounts of the human being were difficult to reconcile with the Christian religion, and both philosophers developed strategies for presenting their philosophy in light of this. But instead of looking at the mechanical philosophy as a chapter in a "march of secularism", and religious issues as mere obstacles to progress, we should consider them rather as issues to be worked out by any new philosophical system. There were many ways of being a mechanical philosopher, and many roads to modern philosophy. (shrink)

By focusing on the exchange between Descartes and Hobbes on how the self is related to its activities, Berkeley draws attention to how he and Hobbes explain the forensic constitution of human subjectivity and moral/political responsibility in terms of passive obedience and conscientious submission to the laws of the sovereign. Formulated as the language of nature or as pronouncements of the supreme political power, those laws identify moral obligations by locating political subjects within those networks of sensible signs. When thus (...) juxtaposed with Hobbes, Berkeley can be understood as endorsing a theologically inflected version of deontological ethics in which moral laws are linked directly to the constitution of the self. (shrink)

s to the Cognitive Sciences, in their excessively brief historical surveys, usually attribute to Thomas Hobbes the merit of having been the first thinker to propose the computational theory of the mind. What they overlook is (a) the fact that Hobbes explicitly assigned to..

This paper begins by tracing the Hobbesian roots of `representationalism:' the thesis that reality is accessible to mind only through representations, images, signs or appearances that indicate a reality lying `behind' them (e.g. as unperceived causes of perceptions). This is linked to two kinds of absolute realism: the `naive' scientific realism of British empiricism, which provoked Berkeley's idealist reaction, and the noumenal realism of Kant. I argue that Husserl defined his position against both Berkeleyian idealism and these forms of absolute (...) realism by way of two arguments: a pragmatic argument against skepticism about the external world (as described by Karl Ameriks) and a distinctively phenomenological argument against the representationalism implied by absolute realism. (shrink)

This paper considers three accounts of the relationship between personal immortality and materialism. In particular, the pagan mortalism of the Epicureans is compared with the Christian mortalism of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke. It is argued 1) that there are significant similarities between these views, 2) that Locke and Hobbes were, to some extent, influenced by the Epicureans, and 3) that the relation between (im)mortality and (im)materialism is not as straightforward as is commonly supposed.

Thomas Hobbes, który badaniu języka poświęcił wiele miejsca, zastanawiał się, czy możliwe jest myślenie — myślenie w ogóle i myślenie abstrakcyjne — bez języka? Hobbes zakładał, że ludzie pozbawieni języka mogą tworzyć własne, niedoskonałe, prywatne języki, pozwalające im na swoiście rozumiane rozumowanie. Na Hobbesowskie pytanie trzysta lat później odpowiada twierdząco wybitny neurolog i literat Oliver Sacks. Na podstawie danych, jakie przyniosła mu praca z osobami głuchymi, nieznającymi żadnego, nawet migowego, języka, dowodzi, że słowa i inne znaki umowne stają się niezbędne (...) dopiero na pewnym etapie procesu myślowego, że myśl jest czymś znacznie szerszym niż słowo, że można — w pewnym sensie — myśleć bez słów. Jak wcześniej Hobbes, Sacks podkreśla, że myślenie, w którym nie korzysta się z powszechnie przyjętych znaków, ma jednak charakter ułomny i niepełny; myślenie takie nie znajduje uzewnętrznienia, izoluje jednostkę z życia w społeczeństwie. (shrink)

This is a short (1,000 word) introduction to Hobbes's materialism, covering (briefly) such issues as what the relevant notion of materialism is, Hobbes's debate with Descartes, and what Hobbes's arguments for materialism were.

This paper discusses the materialist views of Margaret Cavendish, focusing on the relationships between her views and those of two of her contemporaries, Thomas Hobbes and Henry More. It argues for two main claims. First, Cavendish's views sit, often rather neatly, between those of Hobbes and More. She agreed with Hobbes on some issues and More on others, while carving out a distinctive alternative view. Secondly, the exchange between Hobbes, More, and Cavendish illustrates a more general puzzle about just what (...) divided materialists from their opponents. Seemingly straightforward disagreements about whether incorporeal substances exist turn out to be more complex ones in which the nature of those things is disputed at the same time as their existence. (shrink)

In the early years of the eighteenth century Leibniz had several interactions with John Toland. These included, from 1702 to 1704, discussions of materialism. Those discussions culminated with the consideration of Toland's 1704 Letters to Serena, where Toland argued that matter is necessarily active. In this paper I argue for two main theses about this exchange and its consequences for our wider understanding. The first is that, despite many claims that Toland was at the time of Letters to Serena a (...) Spinozist, we can make better sense of him as a sort of Hobbesian materialist. The second main point concerns reasons for materialism, and in particular a story Locke tells in the Essay about materialists' motives. Toland defends his materialism by arguing that matter is active, and argues that matter is active by using a conceivability argument. But this is not the crude conceivability argument that Locke suggests motivates materialists. This (together with reflecting on some of Hobbes's arguments) suggests that we might well tell a Lockean story about reasons for early modern materialism, but not Locke's story. (shrink)

The notion of signification is an important part of Hobbes's philosophy of language. It also has broader relevance, as Hobbes argues that key terms used by his opponents are insignificant. However Hobbes's talk about names' signification is puzzling, as he appears to have advocated conflicting views. This paper argues that Hobbes endorsed two different views of names' signification in two different contexts. When stating his theoretical views about signification, Hobbes claimed that names signify ideas. Elsewhere he talked as if words (...) signified the things they named. Seeing this does not just resolve a puzzle about Hobbes's statements about signification. It also helps us to understand how Hobbes's arguments about insignificant speech work. With one important exception, they depend on the view that names signify things, not on Hobbes's stated theory that words signify ideas. The paper concludes by discussing whether arguments about insignificant speech can provide independent support for Hobbes's views about other issues, such as materialism. (shrink)

I consider Leibniz's thoughts about Hobbes's materialism, focusing on his less-discussed later thoughts about the topic. Leibniz understood Hobbes to have argued for his materialism from his imagistic theory of ideas. Leibniz offered several criticisms of this argument and the resulting materialism itself. Several of these criticisms occur in texts in which Leibniz was engaging with the generation of British philosophers after Hobbes. Of particular interest is Leibniz's correspondence with Damaris Masham. Leibniz may have been trying to communicate with Locke, (...) but ended up discussing Masham's version of the argument for materialism that Leibniz attributed to Hobbes. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679), whose current reputation rests largely on his political philosophy, was a thinker with wide ranging interests. In philosophy, he defended a range of materialist, nominalist, and empiricist views against Cartesian and Aristotelian alternatives. In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and lead him into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the early Royal Society. In history, he translated Thucydides's History of the Peloponnesian War into English, and later wrote his own history of the Long Parliament. (...) In mathematics he was less successful, and is best remembered for his repeated unsuccessful attempts to square the circle. But despite that, Hobbes was a serious and prominent participant in the intellectual life of his time. (shrink)

I argue that Hobbes isn't really a materialist in the early 1640s (in, e.g., the Third Objections to Descartes's Meditations). That is, he doesn't assert that bodies are the only substances. However, he does think that bodies are the only substances we can think about using imagistic ideas.

This dissertation discusses the work of Thomas Hobbes, and has two main themes. The first is Hobbes's materialism, and the second is Hobbes's relationships to other philosophers, in particular his place in the mechanist movement that is said to have replaced Aristotelianism as the dominant philosophy in the seventeenth century. -/- I argue that Hobbes does not, for most of his career, believe the general materialist view that bodies are the only substances. He believes, rather, that ideas, which are our (...) main mechanism for thinking about the world, allow us to understand many bodies, but not to understand every thing we recognize to exist. The incomprehensible things include God---and, early in Hobbes's career, the human mind. Discussing materialism and our knowledge of God leads me to engage with the debate over Hobbes's alleged atheism. I argue that the evidence for Hobbes's atheism is weak at best. Hobbes is a sincere theist, though his view is sometimes unusual. -/- My discussion of Hobbes's relationships to other philosophers has three parts. In chapter five I argue that Hobbes's views about method are in important ways similar to Zabarella's. In chapter six I look at Hobbes's rejection of the view, held by some scholastic Aristotelians, that accidents can sometimes exist without inhering in substances. Thus we see two sides of Hobbes's interaction with the Aristotelian tradition. Sometimes that interaction is just rejection, but at other times Hobbes takes over views from that tradition. Then in chapter seven I consider whether, and in what sense, Hobbes is a mechanist. I argue that the narrative of mechanism and Aristotelianism is a less powerful explanation than it has seemed to some to be, because it is hard to see what mechanists have in common. (shrink)

The paper considers the part of Thomas Hobbes's 'natural man' in the construction of a culturally shared fantasy regarding pre-social humanity, and the marginalization of 'excluded' citizens who are seen in various ways to approximate that fantasy. While Hobbes did not valorize his hypothetical 'natural man,' I argue that his particularly dark elaboration of it lent an ambivalence to this ideal, which thereby enables it to function as a fantasy. With the aid of psychoanalytic theory, the paper explores the relation (...) of Hobbes's psychology of perception to his political philosophy; with particular attention to the resonances between Hobbes's account of the imagination and emotion, and the psychoanalytic notion of fantasy. The fantasy of the pre-contract natural man is then drawn upon to illustrate some concrete social relations which marginalize certain kinds of subject, understood as both 'innocent' and a threat to the community. (shrink)

Hobbes introduces a normative rendering of what "common people" means: what he says to be the ordinary behavior of common men and women is not a description but, rather, a prescription of what their lives should be like if they acted according to the new mechanistic description of their mind. His rendering entails not only a moral turn, later to be called "individualism," but a complete transformation of the basis of morality. This great transformation, that had huge consequences on the (...) way ordinary people are supposed to behave in society, is what this paper is all about. (shrink)

Observing that René Descartes's dualistic philosophy haunts our conceptualization of matter, this essay argues that Thomas Hobbes develops a non-Cartesian materialism, which is to say that he articulates a materialism in which matter is not construed as essentially unthinking. Tracing his accounts of sense, perception, and thinking, this essay reconstructs Hobbes's account of self-consciousness and proposes that in a subject conceived as wholly embodied, self-knowledge or self-awareness takes the form of memory. The essay elaborates how Hobbes 's account of self-consciousness (...) as memory transforms our understanding both of the form taken by the subject's self-mastery and of the relationship between the individual and the collective. It concludes by speculating about the implications of this account for our understanding of Hobbes's theories of ethics and politics. (shrink)

The Scenic Imagination argues that the uniquely human phenomenon of representation, as manifested in language, art, and ritual, is a scenic event focused on a central object designated by a sign. The originary hypothesis posits the necessity of conceiving the origin of the human as such an event. In traditional societies, the scenic imagination through which this scene of origin is conceived manifests itself in sacred creation narratives. Modern thought is defined by the independent use of the scenic imagination to (...) create anthropological models of the origin of human institutions, beginning with the social contract scene in Hobbes’s Leviathan that puts an end to the reciprocal violence of the state of nature. Eric Gans follows the work of the scenic imagination in selected writings of twenty thinkers including Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Marx, Nietzsche, Durkheim, Boas, and Freud and concludes his book with a critical examination of contemporary writing on the origins of religion and language. In the process, he demonstrates that the originary hypothesis offers the most cohesive explanation of the origin and function of these fundamental institutions. (shrink)

In this article, I make a philosophical comparison between Hobbes' and Hume's s conceptions of imagination. The article should not be taken as an examination of Hobbes' real effect on Hume's thinking. That is a historical problem I do not address. In addition to being philosophically comparative, the article is expli- cative. Since the subject matter is so broad, I have been compelled to confine myself to the explicative level in my examination. I unfold Hume's conception of imagination, take Juhana (...) Lemetti's interpretation of Hobbes for granted (with some subtle alterations) and then compare my Hume to Lemetti's Hobbes. I will not go into all the details of Hume's rich and many-sided conception and many problems cannot be discussed in the paper; my intention is to shed some light on Hobbes' and Hume's thinking by comparing their conceptions of imagination and their reasons for the conceptions. (shrink)

Looking at Hobbes ' theory of thinking as calculation and truth by convention shows that a certain type of scientism of the mind leads to fundamental problems. If truth is the artefact of social conventions about signs, and if thinking is nothing but the syntactical transformations of sign, a theory of thinking must have both: a strong concept of natural computation and a social theory of establishing sign-conventions. Hobbes does not, like modern physicalist theories of the mind, have both.

Thomas Holden presents a fascinating study of theories of matter in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. These theories were plagued by a complex of interrelated problems concerning matter's divisibility, composition, and internal architecture. Is any material body infinitely divisible? Must we posit atoms or elemental minima from which bodies are ultimately composed? Are the parts of material bodies themselves material concreta? Or are they merely potentialities or possible existents? Questions such as these -- and the press of subtler questions hidden (...) in their amibiguities -- deeply unsettled philosophers of the early modern period. They seemed to expose serious paradoxes in the new world view pioneered by Galileo, Descartes, and Newton. The new science's account of a fundamentally geometrical Creation, mathematicizable and intelligible to the human inquirer, seemed to be under threat. This was a great scandal, and the philosophers of the period accordingly made various attempts to disarm the paradoxes. All the great figures address the issue: most famously Leibniz and Kant, but also Galileo, Hobbes, Newton, Hume, and Reid, in addition to a crowd of lesser figures. Thomas Holden offers a brilliant synthesis of these discussions and presents his own overarching interpretation of the controversy, locating the underlying problem in the tension between the early moderns' account of material parts on the one hand and the program of the geometrization of nature on the other. (shrink)

Leviathan by Hobbes is one of the most original books in political theory ever written. Broad is scope, rich in ideas and bold in its claims; it contains much more than just political theory. The article focuses on Hobbes’s presentation of human nature, in particular in light of the then new thesis that universe is matter in motion; on observation how human automata whom Hobbes created (as it were) live in state of nature and under authority of “the leviathan”; and (...) on the impact of man’s and woman’s nature on their natural rights. Hobbes pioneered a host of ideas that became a staple food for early modern political thought—state of nature, social contract, individualism, or inalienable rights. The article reviews them and concludes that in spite of illiberal conclusions of his political theory, Hobbes is a proto-liberal thinker that paved the way for Locke and others. (shrink)

L’interprétation dite “computationelle” de la pensée logico-linguistique de Hobbes est aujourd’hui courante. Ele attribue à Hobbes l’idée que penser ou raisonner, c’est essentiellement manipuler des symboles apartenant à une langue publique, c’est calculer sur des noms comme on calcule normalement sur des chiffres ou des lignes . Ce que nous aurions immédiatement dans l’esprit, ce sont des mots, les noms des choses, et non des représentations mentales de ces choses qui leur seraient associées par convention. Cette interprétation soulève bien des (...) problèmes qui ont été discutés dès le XVIIe siècle. Je voudrais montrer qu’il y a, sous la manipulation ou calcul des noms, une ratiocinatio interna sine verbis, un calcul sur des phantasmata qui mérite déjà certainement le titre de pensée. (shrink)

resumo Este artigo procura destacar algumas características do discurso racional em Thomas Hobbes. São analisadas as noções de prudência e ciência. O conhecimento racional repousará na possibilidade de construir, no discurso, um sinal – vox humana – que se sobreponha às marcas – notae – criadas pelos homens para excitar em nosso espírito um pensamento anterior. A seguir, são expostas as noções de proposição, nomes positivos e nomes negativos. Tais noções exibirão o determinismo hobbesiano, elemento determinante não apenas de sua (...) philosophia prima, mas igualmente de sua teoria política. palavras-chave Thomas Hobbes - discurso mental - discurso verbal - universal - determinismo; filosofia civil. (shrink)

This article introduces the doctrine of the passions in the Hobbesian work, showing its debt with tradition, especially the scholastic Aristotelian one, even if, at the same time, it offers some breach features with this tradition, which are also analysed. In addition, the fundamentals of imagination manifest themselves in the appetitive process, in Hobbes's doctrine as well as in the scholastic Aristotelian tradition, showing their similarities and differences.

L'analyse des rapports entre les concepts de temps et de mouvement dans la philosophie première de Hobbes permet de confirmer la dimension dynamique de son matérialisme qui ne prend sens qu'avec la théorie unifiée du conatus. Elle nous conduit aussi à reconsidérer le nominalisme radical qu'on lui attribue généralement, à partir d'une interrogation sur le statut de ce que Hobbes appelle la puissance imaginative. The analysis of the relations between the concepts of time and movement in Hobbes' first philosophy allows (...) that dynamic dimension of his materialism which only takes on meaning with the unified theory of the conatus, to be confirmed. It also leads us to reconsider the radical nominalism that is generally attributed to him, by means of an interrogation of the status of what Hobbes calls imaginative power. (shrink)