A careful reading of Hobbes' philosophical writings reveals that this author forwards no fewer than three distinct conceptions of the pre-political situation which he labels "the natural condition of humankind," or "the state of nature." By examining the relevant passages from The Elements of Law, De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes' three principal works of political philosophy, I demonstrate that Hobbes' state of nature should not be interpreted as a single invariant concept but rather as a series of three distinct heuristic (...) or expository models. Further, I claim that distinctions between Hobbes' various conceptions of the state of nature reflect differing background assumptions concerning such factors as the prevailing degree of group stability and the level of abstractness with which representative human beings are characterized. ;After establishing this framework, I examine why Hobbes chose to include three distinct conceptions of the state of nature within his writings, and explore the relationship which appears to obtain among these three conceptions. I next examine the manner by which each of Hobbes' three types of commonwealth, namely commonwealth by institution, commonwealth by preservation and commonwealth by acquisition, can be understood to arise from each of Hobbes' three conceptions of the state of nature. In this section, I focus my analysis upon the transitions which occur when the unencumbered and isolated individuals who inhabit the state of nature enter into the social contract by "transferring" their respective rights of nature to the sovereign of their incipient commonwealth. Moreover, I examine Hobbes' explanation of why each subject incurs an obligation to obey his sovereign's decrees and I address the apparent difficulty of maintaining the subjects' allegiance to their sovereign in light of Hobbes' portrayal of human beings as passionate and predominantly self-serving creatures. I conclude by arguing that given Hobbes' characterization of humans as passionate and predominantly self-serving creatures, one can probably not expect commonwealths to arise in the manner that Hobbes describes, and one can certainly not expect such commonwealths, if established, to endure for any substantial period of time. (shrink)

Thomas Hobbes's doctrine of space is here considered as an example of the Nachzuirkung of Jesuit commentaries on Aristotle's natural philosophy in seventeenth-century mechanistic science. Hobbes's doctrine of space can be reconstructed in terms of his intensive dialogue with late scholasticism, as represented in the works of several important Jesuit authors. Although he presents his concept of space as an alternative to the Aristotelian notion of place, there are some remarkable similarities between Hobbes's alternative notion of space and the concept (...) of spatium imaginarium, found in the Jesuit commentaries. While Hobbes adopts many scholastic elements, he employs these to his own purposes. Thus, on the one hand, this article does not so much challenge Hobbes's "modernity", but rather tries to put it in its proper perspective. On the other hand, it tries to show the vitality and importance of Jesuit natural philosophy in non- or even anti-Aristotelian contexts. (shrink)

Recent philosophical work on causation has focused on distinctions across types of causal relationships. This paper argues for another distinction that has yet to receive attention in this work. This distinction has to do with whether causal relationships have “material continuity,” which refers to the reliable movement of material from cause to effect. This paper provides an analysis of material continuity and argues that causal relationships with this feature are associated with a unique explanatory perspective, are studied with distinct causal (...) investigative methods, and provide different types of causal control over their effects. (shrink)

Consider the distinctive qualitative property grass visually appears to have when it visually appears to be green. This property is an example of what I call sensuous color. Whereas early modern mechanists typically argue that bodies are not sensuously colored, Margaret Cavendish (1623–73) disagrees. In cases of veridical perception, she holds that grass is green in precisely the way it visually appears to be. In defense of her realist approach to sensuous colors, Cavendish argues that (i) it is impossible to (...) conceive of colorless bodies, (ii) the very possibility of color experience requires that bodies are sensuously colored, and (iii) the attribution of sensuous colors to bodies provides the best explanation of color constancy. Although some passages might suggest that Cavendish endorses a reductive account of sensuous color, according to which sensuous color reduces to a body's microscopic surface texture (or some other mechanistically respectable property), I argue that she accepts a nonreductive account, on which sensuous color is not thus reducible. (shrink)

This paper explores Thomas Hobbes’s account of animal life and mind. After a critical examination of Hobbes’s mechanistic explanation of operations of the mind such as perception and memory, I argue that his theory derives its strength from his idea of the dynamic interaction of the body with its surroundings. This dynamic interaction allows Hobbes to maintain that the purposive disposition of the animal is not merely an upshot of its material configuration, but an expression of its distinctive bodily history. (...) In support of Hobbes, I show how this is complemented by his account of the unity and continuity of the animal body in terms of a unification through the self-preserving drive that originates in perception. Nonetheless, I argue that Hobbes’s philosophy of animal life and mental faculties is hindered by a kind of epiphenomenalist perspective that is embedded in his materialist framework, and this perspective leaves the status of ideas and mental content unclear. I explain why Hobbes’s dynamic theory, founded upon the reciprocal determination of moving bodies, supports his idea of animal development and habituation while failing to account for the reflexivity of the mind. (shrink)