early works like the Short Tract, but acknowledges that in his mature natural philosophy Hobbes affects a “radical breach” with Aristotle.19 19 “Affirmat quidem Deus esse Corpus” (2012, 1228; OL III.561).
20 20 Hobbes seems to embrace corporeal God in at least two other places: An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (EW IV.398) and Considerations Upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners and Religion of Thomas Hobbes (EW IV.427). Also in the much earlier (1641) letter to Mersenne, Descartes dismisses Hobbes’s mention (in a lost letter to Descartes) of “the corporeal soul and God” (anima & Deo corporeis) (AT 3.287).
21 21 Curley (1992), Jesseph (2002), and Martinich (1992).
22 22 Fortunately, a number of authors have very recently presented detailed discussions of the corporeal God doctrine; but they do not investigate in much detail its likely sources. See Lupoli (1999), Leijenhorst (2004), Weber (2009), and Springborg (2012).
23 23 See also Alexander of Aphrodisias’ similar complaint against the Stoics for “claiming the existence of two universal principles, matter and God,” which are mixed yet unequal (On Mixture XI, 224–5, T 1976, 139; LS 1987, 273, 275).
24 24 See also Diogenes Laertius, Lives of the Philosophers 7, 150; 1997, 137; Sextus Empiricus, Against the Professors 9, 75–6, LS 1987, 269; Plutarch, On Stoic Self-Contradictions, 1053f; LS 1987, 284.
25 25 See also Leviathan XXXIV (2012, 612; 1651, 303). The editor of this volume has rightly observed that in passages of Leviathan in which Hobbes equates spirit and breath or pneuma, he is mainly dealing with the Christian (not necessarily Stoic) sources of this doctrine. Hobbes’s appeal to the doctrine in the Answer to Bramhall, however, is revealing since it comes just before his detailed defense of the corporeal god. So it is ironic that the Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth, in his vehemently anti-Hobbesian tome, The True Intellectual System of the Universe (1678), diagnoses atheists as suffering from “pneumatophobia”: “an irrational but desperate abhorrence from spirits or incorporeal substances” (1845, Vol. I, 200).
26 26 For discussion see Sambursky (2014, ch. 3), Todd (1978), and especially Sorabji (1988, chs. 5–7).
27 27 For further discussion of the parallels between the Stoic and Hobbesian physico-theologies, see Gorham (2014a). See Gorham (2013) for more on the role of corporeal God in Hobbesian physics.
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