Hobbes's Early Philosophical Development

Abstract

During the larger part of this century, especially in the United States and Britain, the study of Hobbes's thought has tended to focus much more on his political and moral philosophy than on his achievements in natural philosophy and his contribution to the scientific revolution. Since modem scholars regard Hobbes's political and moral theory as the most lastingly important part of his work, this emphasis is understandable. Yet not only were his philosophical and scientific conceptions intimately connected in his own view, but he was a natural philosopher before he ever became a political philosopher; and when, following the publication of his translation of Thucydides in 1628 and his first acquaintance with Euclid's Elements, he decided to dedicate himself to philosophy, it was physics or mechanics, optics, and the problem of sensory perception that absorbed his attention. Not until 1640, after the growing revolt against the Stuart monarchy forced him to turn his mind to politics, did he write his first treatise on political theory. In studying his philosophical development, scholars have generally agreed on two main points. The first is the central importance of the manuscript treatise entitled A Short Tract on First Principles, the first extant of Hobbes's philosophical writings and one that he never published, as a documentary source for the roots of his metaphysics and the formation of his scientific ideas. The second is the evidence this composition offers of the exceptional originality and scope of Hobbes's attempt to construct a mechanistic explanation of sensory experience in terms of the causal agency of the motion of bodies, a conception that was to occupy thereafter a fundamental position in all of his philosophic work. In view of the consensus that has existed concerning the significance of the Short Tract, it comes as a considerable surprise to learn that a present-day Hobbes scholar has denied his authorship of this work. I refer to Richard Tuck, who has rejected its attribution to Hobbes in several recent articles as well as in his volume on Hobbes in the Past Masters collection, a series of