on Hobbes’s natural philosophy by considering how it was attacked by two English critics: Robert Boyle and Henry More. Boyle’s aim was to develop an acausal experimental method against Hobbes’s speculative philosophy. Doing so, Henry shows, aided Boyle’s goal of showing that God must play an active role in the world. More sought to dismiss Hobbes’s monistic materialism in favor of a dualism of body and immaterial spirit. Henry suggests that although these critics, and others, wanted to distance themselves from Hobbist ideas, there are similarities between Hobbes’s corporeal God and Henry More’s concept of an immaterial, three-dimensionally extended God.
Stewart Duncan’s chapter “Cudworth as a Critic of Hobbes” looks to Ralph Cudworth’s criticisms of Hobbes that relate to atheism and to whether morality is eternal and immutable. Cudworth worries about atheism in his work The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), and he attacks various versions, singling out Hobbes as a point of focus. Duncan examines Cudworth’s criticisms of the claim that finite beings possess no idea of God, and Cudworth’s accusation that from that claim it would follow that God does not exist. Cudworth responds to this claim that humans possess no idea of God and to what he understands as the arguments in favor of that view. Duncan also discusses Cudworth’s critique of Hobbes in Treatise on Eternal and Immutable Morality (1996) and shows Cudworth’s claim, against his understanding of Hobbes, that which is good is not made so by human decision.
Margaret Cavendish’s natural philosophy offers an interesting contrast to Hobbes’s since she understands all of nature to be matter but suggests that all motion happens by self-motion. In “Cavendish and Hobbes on Causation,” Marcy P. Lascano discusses Cavendish’s account of causation and contrasts it with Hobbes’s view of causation by means of an “entire cause.” Lascano focuses on perception, a key component of Cavendish’s natural philosophy, and shows that perceivers are not the entire cause of their perceptions. Against understanding Cavendish as advocating for a libertarian view of causation and of the parts of nature, Lascano links Cavendish to the Hobbesian account of liberty.
Spinoza’s debt to Hobbes is well known, in particular the appeal that both figures make to the concept of conatus (endeavor). Justin Steinberg’s chapter “Striving, Happiness, and the Good: Spinoza as Follower and Critic of Hobbes” shows how both Hobbes and Spinoza reject key features of Scholastic accounts of motivation. Both figures are determinists who dismiss free will and furthermore deny appeals to final causes, offering instead reductive accounts of ends by appealing only to efficient causes. However, after exposing these similarities, Steinberg argues that Spinoza’s naturalistic eudaimonism leads him to have views different from Hobbes concerning goodness, happiness, liberty, and the function of the state.
Scholars of Mary Astell have noted how in some of her well-known works, such as A Serious Proposal to the Ladies, Parts I and II, she criticizes Hobbesian ideas, in particular those related to the natural state of humans and the social contract needed for leaving that state. Jacqueline Broad’s chapter “Hobbes and Astell on War and Peace” shows that in three political pamphlets of Astell’s from 1704 she also engages with Hobbesian ideas related to war and peace. Although Astell seeks to distance herself from Hobbes’s philosophy, Broad shows how Astell adopts aspects of his view and even extends his ideas to claim that sexist opinions about female sovereigns and about women’s susceptibility to seditious opinion represent a threat to social order.
David Hume’s account of selfishness and human nature has been contrasted with Hobbes’s, with the latter sometimes viewed as an egoist. Alexandra Chadwick’s chapter “Hobbes and Hume on Human Nature: ‘Much of a Dispute of Words’?” challenges this conception of Hobbes, showing that the differences between Hobbes and Hume on selfishness become less clear when examining their philosophical psychology. Chadwick argues that instead the difference lies in Hobbes’s rhetorical aim: Hobbes believes it dangerous to think too highly of human nature. When Hobbes presents individuals who claim to have the interests of the people in mind as driven by self-serving desires, he seeks to discourage citizens from listening to them.
In the chapter “He Shows ‘Genius’ and Is ‘More Useful than Pufendorf’: Kant’s Reception of Hobbes,” Howard Williams examines Kant’s reaction to Hobbes’s view that open public inquiry can endanger society. Whereas Kant held that such debate among scholars was an essential feature of healthy society, Kant saw Hobbes as wrongly vesting all power in the sovereign to decide what viewpoints may be heard. Alongside this disagreement with Hobbes, Williams shows that Kant agreed with Hobbes on the sovereign’s authority being unchallengeable; Kant’s claim that open debate was necessary did not allow resistance to the sovereign but implied only a right to communicate. Williams concludes by considering Kant’s rejection both of Hobbes’s methodology and Hobbes’s reliance upon philosophical psychology to understand human nature.
Karen Green’s chapter “Catharine Macaulay and the Reception of Hobbes during the Eighteenth Century” shows that although critics of liberal democracy have represented it as grounded in Hobbes’s philosophy, the role Hobbes played was not so direct. Green shows that instead Macaulay’s view looked forward to a democratic commonwealth, in which the common good would be the common care, and she based her advocacy of democratic institutions in natural law, rational religion, Christian eudaimonism, and rational altruism. Green suggests that subsequent philosophical developments help explain why Hobbes came take on the central philosophical position that he currently occupies.
3 Strategies for Unity among the Parts of Hobbes’s Philosophy
The earlier discussion of the Table in Leviathan 9 suggested that it does not show the structure of Hobbes’s philosophy. If the Table does not display this, what are strategies for understanding how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophy fit together? For example, how does Hobbes’s civil philosophy relate to his claims about human nature? Or how is Hobbes’s natural philosophy dependent upon geometry or first philosophy? Although Hobbes provides some clues at several points in his writings, there is no largely agreed-upon strategy among Hobbes scholars of accounting for how the different parts of his philosophy depend upon one another.
In terms of the number of its adherents, perhaps the best-represented account of how the parts of Hobbes’s philosophy fit together is what might be called the “deductivist” interpretation of Hobbes’s philosophy. Those holding the deductivist interpretation often appeal to De corpore VI.613 and broadly see Hobbes as holding something like the following viewpoint: claims in civil philosophy would be deduced from “morals” (the term Hobbes uses to describe the part of philosophy that considers desire and aversion, as well as the passions generally); claims in “morals” would be deduced from claims in natural philosophy; and claims in natural philosophy would be deduced from geometry and, ultimately, from first philosophy (Hobbes’s preferred term for his metaphysics).
Scholars who understand Hobbes in this way have focused both on the shape of his philosophy overall as well as on the relationships among parts of it. For example, in their account of the debate between Hobbes and Robert Boyle concerning the air-pump experiments, Steven Shapin and Simon Schaffer describe Boyle as “protecting the proper procedures of experimental philosophy against the beast of deductivism” (Shapin and Schaffer 1985, 176). On the move from philosophical psychology to civil philosophy (this is the fault line in Hobbes’s thought, described already), and how this relates to deduction, there has been significant disagreement among commentators. In particular, if one holds that Hobbes’s claims in civil philosophy are grounded in moral claims then, if one simultaneously holds the deductivist interpretation, the question of the ground of those moral claims is pressing, since it appears that Hobbes would be guilty of deriving ought-statements from is-statements. In other words, Hobbes would appear to be committing a version of the so-called naturalistic fallacy. R.S. Peters argues that such a deduction was Hobbes’s intent and that Hobbes falls prey to this fallacy, asserting that “Hobbes seems to have thought that the basic prescription ‘men ought to endeavour peace’ can be deduced from psychology and physics. This
