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Abstract
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.
I wish to thank Zvi Biener, Mary Domski, Daniel Garber, Geoffrey Gorham, Peter Machamer, Joseph Milburn, and Kathryn Tabb for helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I also thank the participants of the Hobbes and Spinoza Workshop at the Center for Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh in October 2013 for their feedback. This research was supported by a Fellowship from the Mellon Foundation and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Notes
1I cite Descartes, Oeuvres de Descartes as AT, Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes as CSM, Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes as CSMK, Hobbes, The English Works of Thomas Hobbes as EW, Hobbes, Thomae Hobbes Malmesburiensis Opera Philosophica as OL, and Hobbes, The Elements of Law as EL, followed by chapter and article.
2Ms. 5297 (National Library of Wales), Chatsworth ms. A10, and Harleian ms. 6083, respectively. Jacquot and Jones (Hobbes, Critique du de Mundo de Thomas White) transcribe ms. 5297. I thank His Grace the Duke of Devonshire, the Trustees of the Chatsworth Settlement, and Andrew Peppit and James Towe, the archivists at Chatsworth, for allowing me to examine ms. A10 during my visit to the archives in 2011. Harleian ms. 6083 has been digitized by the British Library and is available at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Harley_MS_6083.
3Much scholarship has been concerned with Hobbes's intellectual development during this period. For example, Duncan, ‘Hobbes's Materialism in the Early 1640s’ argues that Hobbes was not a materialist in the 1640s, Shapiro, ‘Kinematic Optics’ highlights Hobbes's changing views of the propagation of light in media, and there have been extended debates about the authorship of the so-called ‘Short Tract’ and what could be inferred from it about Hobbes's early thought (see, e.g. Tuck, ‘Hobbes and Descartes’; Raylor, ‘Hobbes, Payne, and ‘A Short Tract on First Principles’; Zagorin, ‘Hobbes's Early Philosophical Development’). I show that Hobbes's mechanical account of mind and his epistemology remained consistent from the 1630s and 1640s until its completion in De corpore.
4The nature of analysis for Hobbes will be discussed in greater detail below.
5For example, Alanen (Descartes's Concept of Mind, 119), Lennon, ‘The Inherence Pattern and Descartes’ Ideas’, and Mori, ‘Hobbes, Descartes, and Ideas’.
6Sorell (‘Hobbes's Objections and Hobbes's System’, 88). For similar criticisms, see Costa (‘What Cartesian Ideas are Not’, 544). Curley defends Hobbes's understanding of the Second Meditation but finds Hobbes ‘at his most dogmatic’ in a later Objection (‘Hobbes versus Descartes’, 104; see Duncan, ‘Hobbes's Materialism in the Early 1640s’, 446–7, for criticism of this latter point).
7Clarke (Descartes's Theory of Mind, 9; cf. 35ff) views Descartes's appeal to mental faculties in the Meditations, compared with his natural-philosophical work on the human body before the Meditations, as a non-explanatory stopping point that should be seen as a ‘provisional halt’ of explanation, not as some in-principle limit.
8Rather than seeing Hobbes as having supplanted the active intellect with language (cf. Leijenhorst, The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism, 94), on my account conceiving replaces the active intellect. For more discussion on language replacing the intellect, see Leijenhorst (‘Sense and Nonsense about Sense’, 97) and Pettit (Made with Words, 29).
9Gassendi criticizes this metaphor in his Objections to the Meditations (AT VII.271–272; CSM II.189–190) and later in his Rebuttals (The Rebuttals against Descartes, 198–9), arguing that whatever this method may be, ‘the bare substance … will always retain its hidden quality’ (The Rebuttals against Descartes, 198). Similarly, Hobbes holds that we never know substance, since just as we have no idea of God, ‘we do not have an idea of substance’ (Ninth Objection; AT VII.185; CSM II.131).
10See Garber (Descartes’ Metaphysical Physics, 42). Curley (Descartes against the Skeptics, 45) highlights Descartes's lack of concern with engaging the sceptic in the Rules.
11Descartes understands Hobbes, as many have, to be a definitional conventionalist. Leibniz also criticizes Hobbes as a ‘super-nominalist’, claiming that Hobbes made definitions as well as truth depend upon human will (cf. Leibniz, G.W. Leibniz Philosophy Papers and Letters, 128). On such a view, we can define names however we desire, irrespective of what they signify. However, Descartes misunderstands Hobbes's emphasis on language. For Hobbes, inferences in language themselves tell us nothing about things; instead, we must examine the conceptions in the imagination that are signified by the names in the inferences. I criticize the conventionalist interpretation of Hobbes in my paper ‘Hobbes, Definitions, and Simplest Conceptions’ (Adams, ‘Hobbes, Definitions, and Simplest Conceptions’).
12See Leijenhorst (‘Sense and Nonsense about Sense’, 96–7, fn. 63–64) for discussion of these aspects in Leviathan and De corpore.
13This is an early version of the annihilation-of-the-world thought experiment, which reappears for a different purpose in De corpore 7 (OL I.65–66).
14Unlike in De corpore, where the heart is responsible for the outward motion in both conceptions and passions (e.g. De corpore 29.1, OL I.396), in Elements of Law the brain alone is responsible for the outward motion that forms the conception that a body is outside of us. In Elements of Law, the heart is involved only in the outward motions of the passions and ‘conception is nothing but motion within the head’ (EL VII.1).
15Malcolm (‘A Summary Biography of Hobbes’, fns. 49 & 70) dates ms. 5297 to 1642–43, but Rossi, Alle fonti del deismo e del materialismo moderno and Pacchi, Convenzione e ipotesi nella formazione della filosophia naturale di Thomas Hobbes have suggested earlier dates. Even if these notes were written as late as 1642–43, Hobbes likely began the philosophical psychology as early as 1637: in a letter written in January of that year, Digby refers to Hobbes's work on ‘conceptions’ in his ‘Logike’ (Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 42), and in a letter written in September of that same year, he begs Hobbes to send him any part of his ‘Logike’ as soon as it is completed (Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 50). Malcolm speculates that ‘Logike’ refers to Ms. 5297 (Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 43 fn. 2).
16In correspondence from 21/31 October 1634, Hobbes strangely explains why one has a better memory of a friend's face than of one's own face by appealing to the remaining motions that have varying amounts of ‘force’ (Hobbes, The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, 22).
17There is also a similar account in Tractatus Opticus I (1644).
18For example, Hungerland and Vick (‘Hobbes's Theory of Signification’; Hobbes, Computatio sive Logica), de Jong (‘Hobbes's Logic’; ‘Did Hobbes have a Semantic Theory of Truth?’), Machamer and Sakellariadis, ‘The Unity of Hobbes's Philosophy’, and Pettit, Made with Words.
19See EL V.1. I argue that this is the case in later works, such as De corpore, in my paper ‘Hobbes on Maker's Knowledge and Scientia’.
20Hobbes understands one name comprehending another to be a containment relation. In the Elements of Logick, Du Moulin connects mathematical containment with relations between subjects and attributes in logic: ‘that which in the Mathematicks is said, to containe, in Logick is said, to be attributed’ (The Elements of Logick, 122), and he illustrates this logical relationship by appeal to relationships among numbers, such as that ‘[t]welve containeth six, and six containeth three, therefore twelve containeth three’ (The Elements of Logick, 124). Hobbes uses a nearly identical example in De corpore 7.9 (OL I.86–87) to talk about how larger numbers are compounded (componere) out of smaller ones.
21In the discussion that follows, I italicize names and render conceptions in capitals.
22In his Fifth Objection, Hobbes argues that Christians are forbidden from making graven images because ‘otherwise we might think that we were conceiving of him who is incapable of being conceived’ (AT VII.180; CSM II.127). Regarding this passage, Martinich (The Two Gods of the Leviathan, 54) appeals to Leviathan 11 (EW III.92–93) to argue that ‘[t]he clear thrust of this passage [from Leviathan] is that people can conceive of God even if they have no sense experience of him’. However, Martinich's claim results from a failure to see that Hobbes uses conceive in two distinct ways: first, to discuss the process of forming conceptions, and second, to refer to the process of analysing and synthesizing in order to learn about a thing's nature or whether it exists (for examples of the first usage, see EL I.8, EL III.4, OL I.3–4, and OL I.21; for examples of the second usage, see EL XI.2, OL I.9, and OL I.68). For Hobbes, we can conceive only that there is a God – the second sense of conceive – when we look at the world around us and conceive that there is a cause of all that is. Duncan highlights that even though Hobbes does not think that we can have an idea of God, Hobbes is nevertheless committed to the existence of immaterial beings, such as angels, in his Objections to the Meditations (The English Works of Thomas Hobbes, 444).
23In Anti-White, the imaginability restriction allows Hobbes to radically redefine being (ens) as ‘everything that has space, or which can be measured as to length, breadth and depth’ (Hobbes, Thomas White's De Mundo Examined, 311), so that ens and ‘body’ become synonymous.
24Hobbes provides a third example in De corpore 6.3 (OL I.60) that I do not discuss.
25Hobbes claims this in Elements of Law: ‘Seeing there be many conceptions of one and the same thing, and for every several conception we give it a several name’ (EL V.5).
26See De corpore 6.4 (OL I.61). Hobbes uses cognoscere to describe apprehension of simplest conceptions and contrasts it with scire to describe knowledge of the ‘causes of things’ acquired by analysis and synthesis. The Molesworth translation (EW I.68) and the most recent translation of Part I of De corpore (Hobbes, Computatio sive Logica, 292–3) obscure this distinction between cognoscere and scire by translating both as ‘know/known’.