A Companion to Hobbes. Группа авторов

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of life) have been purged.4

      The end of science [scientia] is the demonstration of the causes and generations of things; which if they be not in the definitions, they cannot be found in the conclusion of the first syllogism, that is made from those definitions; and if they be not in the first conclusion, they will not be found in any further conclusion deduced from that.

      (EW I.82)

      In Leviathan Hobbes spells out how a methodical process of connecting names into propositions, and propositions into deductive proofs known as syllogisms, results in scientia. Reason, he says, is:

      attayned by Industry; first in apt imposing of Names; and secondly by getting a good and orderly Method in proceeding from the Elements, which are Names, to assertions made by Connexions of one of them to another; and so to Syllogisms, which are the Connexions of one Assertion to another, til we come to a knowledge of all the Consequences of names appertaining to the subject in hand; and that is it, men call SCIENCE.

      (2012, 72; 1651, 21)

      When Hobbes claims to have inaugurated a scientia civilis, he means a body of conclusions about the commonwealth that can be deduced syllogistically from methodically attained premises that ultimately derive from definitions. Hence, though I will follow convention and translate “scientia” and the corresponding verb, “scire,” as “scientific knowledge” and “to know scientifically,” I do not thereby speak of experimental science in our sense. For other forms of knowing, which Hobbes labels cognitio, I employ the broader term “cognition.”

      1.2 Hobbes’s Method for Scientific Knowing

      With the domain of philosophical ratiocination clearly delimited, Hobbes in Chapter 6 of De corpore derives what every method has in common from his definition of Philosophy. This generic definition of method superficially echoes Scholastic views of scientific demonstration.

      Therefore, the Method of philosophizing is the shortest investigation of the effect through causes having been cognized, or of the causes through the effect having been cognized. We are then said to know a certain effect scientifically [scire] when we both cognize its causes [and] that they are; and in which subject they inhere, and in which subject they introduce the effect, and in what manner they make it. Thus, scientific knowledge is τοῦ διότι or of causes; every other cognition which is called τοῦ ὅτι is sense, or imagination or memory remaining from sense.

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