can be universal, but only that these words, living creature, stone, & c. are universal names, that is, names common to many things; and the conceptions answering them in our mind, are the images and phantasms of several living creatures or other things” (EW I.20). Such universal notions or pictures could consist in several particular ideas that we link to each other and to an abstract name.24 24 Hobbes seems to assume that our universal notions mirror the underlying faculties of real things. He shares this assumption with the Portuguese Jesuit philosopher, Pedro da Fonseca, and early seventeenth-century German Scholastics influenced by Fonseca’s metaphysics. Walter Sparn observes of the latter, “Their approach assumes ontologically that subtilitas [acuteness/mental penetration] is suited to experienced things, i.e., there is kinship and internal reference to God, both among things and in relation to the human intellect, by virtue of which they [things] exist in it [the human intellect] as especially representable and abstractable into general concepts. In this manner, the first principles of their knowledge can be drawn from the proportional being of things” (Sparn 2001, 481, translation mine).
25 25 Notably, Hobbes claims that in moral science, instead of proceeding from the definitions of human will and passions obtained in physics, we can directly resolve our conception of an unjust action into “fact against law” and the notion of law into “the command of him or them that have coercive power” (EW I.74). Power will be further resolvable into the wills and passions of humans constituting the power, but these can be cognized by experience rather than demonstrated from the principles of physics. Hobbes also uses thought experiments to get clear on basic concepts, like space, possibly because simples are not resolvable. Adams draws an interesting parallel between the annihilation thought experiment in De corpore and the state of nature device to reveal the concept of equality (Adams 2019, 9–11).
26 26 It is, admittedly, less clear how one would deduce natural laws using this particular method. This requires more research.
27 27 Nor is analysis2 a resolution into universal notions since a medium and sentient body are both more specific than matter in general. However, it loosely resembles strict analysis in that it distinguishes something complex into parts.
2 The Stoic Roots of Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy and First Philosophy
GEOFFREY GORHAM
While Hobbes’s Natural Philosophy and First Philosophy are indebted to many sources, including fellow travelers (like Bacon and Galileo), late Aristotelians (like Zabarella and the Coimbra Commentators), and the Greeks themselves (like Aristotle and the Epicureans), the Stoic influence is not yet fully clear. To be sure, the impact of Classical and Renaissance Stoicism and Epicureanism upon Hobbes’s political philosophy has been well documented (Springborg 2010; Tuck 1983). But the Stoic roots of his science and metaphysics have not been so thoroughly investigated. This imbalance is especially worth correcting since the Stoics and Hobbes both aimed to unify all the branches of knowledge. And as thoroughgoing materialists, they both endeavored to find a place for the apparent “incorporeals”, space, time, causality, and God. One option was simply to deny the reality of these beings, and indeed Hobbes has often been characterized as an idealist about space and time, a subjectivist about the causal connection, and an atheist about God. But such characterizations are problematic insomuch as space, time, causality, and God all play important roles in Hobbes’s decidedly realist program in natural philosophy. We can better appreciate the subtlety of Hobbes’s metaphysics and science by tracing its Stoic pedigree.
The brief first part of this chapter identifies three main sources of the Stoic elements in Hobbes’s philosophy: the early Christian-Stoic Tertullian, the modern “Neo-Stoic” school of Justus Lipsius, and the natural philosophers of the Cavendish Circle he frequented. The longer second part explores in detail the Stoic character of Hobbesian space, time, causality, and God, especially as these notions are employed in his natural philosophy. We shall see that Hobbes’s metaphysical views, though quite unorthodox in his day, served to buttress his overall materialist, empiricist, and mechanist program in natural philosophy.
2.1 Stoic Sources
A scholar of classical Greek language and literature throughout his life, Hobbes made translations of Thucydides in his thirties and Homer in his eighties (EW VIII; EW X). He mentions the “Stoa” as a major school of Athens in Leviathan XLVI (2012, 1056; 1651, 521) and endorses various insights of Cicero in Leviathan V (2012, 68; 1651, 31)1 though he demurs from the Stoic thesis that all crimes are equal in Leviathan XXVII (2012, 466; 1651, 231). The famous Stoic doctrine of fate (heimarmene) is referenced in the Latin edition of Leviathan (Leviathan, Appendix I; 2012, 1152; OL III. 517). Of course, Stoicism was widely popular in the intellectual culture of sixteenth and seventeenth century Europe (see Barker and Goldstein 1984; Brooke 2012; Lagrée 1994; Long 2003).2 So whence the particular influence on Hobbes’s natural philosophy?
2.1.1 Tertullian
Perhaps the most direct Stoical impact on Hobbes was the second/third century Church Father Tertullian. A Roman Christian-Stoic, Tertullian insisted, like Hobbes, on the philosophical and Scriptural truth of materialism about God and finite souls. He endorsed the “probable opinion of the Stoics,” which he explicitly adapted from Zeno, Cleanthes, and Chrysippus, that the soul is a corporeal “breath” or “spirit” that permeates the body. This is Hobbes’s understanding of Scripture as well in Leviathan XLIV (2012, 612, 974; 1651, 303, 481). Like modern materialists, Tertullian argues that dualism makes soul–body interaction problematic since “there is nothing in common between things corporeal and things incorporeal.”3 Hobbes repeatedly invokes the authority of Tertullian in works that develop and defend the corporeal God doctrine (to be discussed later) in the 1660s. The first instance is the 1662 Considerations Upon the Reputation of Thomas Hobbes, a late volley in the long battle with Oxford mathematician John Wallis. Against the charge that his materialism is “atheism by consequence,” Hobbes quotes verbatim from Tertullian’s De carne Christi: “whatever is anything is a body of its kind. Nothing is incorporeal but that which has no being” (EW IV.429; Tertullian, De carne Christi xi; 1885, 531). Hobbes cites the same passage in two 1660’s works that announce the corporeal God doctrine – the Latin Leviathan and the Answer to Bramhall – as well as in the 1680 Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (2012, 1228; OL III.561; EW IV.307, 383; EW IV.398). Although De carne Christi is thoroughly materialist, it does not pronounce directly on the corporeity of God. However, in the Latin Leviathan’s affirmation of that doctrine, Hobbes cites an additional Tertullian text, against the heretic Praxeas: “every substance is a body of its own kind” (2012, 1228; OL III.561). Hobbes slightly misquotes Tertullian, but he clearly has in mind the following passage, which explicitly asserts the corporeity of God: “Who will deny that God is body (deum corpus esse) although God is a spirit?” (Ad Praxeas vii, 1885, 602).4 There are other texts Hobbes might have encountered in his careful reading of Tertullian that reflect even more closely his own formulation of corporeal theism.5
2.1.2 Neo-Stoicism
The “Neo-Stoical” school, founded by the sixteenth-century Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius, was immensely influential in Hobbes’s day. Lipsius’ many expositions of Stoic ethics and politics, especially De constantia (1584), were widely read and discussed.6 He also composed several more rigorous summaries of Stoic metaphysics and natural philosophy such as
