Knowledge is Memory, or, Finding Hobbes’s Plato

Abstract

Abstract This article attempts to identify Hobbes’s reading and understanding of Plato’s writings by looking at the first seven direct references to Platonic dialogues in the Hobbesian corpus, which range from 1629–42, including Hobbes’s unpublished manuscript writings. By analysing these references it is determined that Hobbes is likely to have had first hand knowledge of Plato, from a Latin and/or Greek edition of Plato’s complete works. The references to Plato’s works in Hobbes’s writings are eclectic and philological for the most part, and serve to demonstrate the depth and range of his reading of Plato. It is only by 1642 that Hobbes makes a clear statement of his commitment to a Platonic principle, viz. that knowledge is memory. In the second half of the article I shall then argue that this principle is a foundational aspect of Hobbes’s philosophy, and that its Platonic origins thus help us to understand both Hobbes’s philosophical system and the different ways in which an “Oxford Platonism” emerged in the seventeenth century.