Hobbes and the method of natural science

Abstract

Hobbes's philosophy of natural science is dominated by the idea that all true knowledge must arise from an understanding of causes, so that a genuinely scientific account of a phenomenon requires knowledge of the process by which it was produced. This emphasis on the scientific priority of causal knowledge was by no means a methodological novelty in the seventeenth century. Aristotle's Posterior Analytics, the source for the traditional Scholastic understanding of science, declares that scientific understanding must be rooted in the knowledge of causes. Aristotle and his Scholastic followers conceived of substances as composites of form and matter, and their methodology distinguished between formal, material, efficient, and final causes. Thus, a causal explanation in the Scholastic tradition might include reference to a substance's form (the formal cause), its matter (the material cause), the process that produced it (the efficient cause), and the end or purpose for which it was produced (the final cause).