Seventeenth-Century Thinker Thomas Hobbes maintained that his philosophy constituted a unified system, but in what precise sense did he think that the branches of his philosophy were unified? This question has provoked extensive scholarship over the last half-century. Answering it is essential not only to understanding Hobbes's philosophy generally, but how one answers it significantly impacts our understanding of the Leviathan, his most influential work, and of the Laws of Nature, the foundation of his political philosophy.
Hobbes's Two Sciences answers the question of philosophical unificiation by situating Hobbes's politics within his account of scientific knowledge as constructed by humans—an epistemology founded on the idea that makers have special access to causal knowledge—and by demonstrating that the relationship between pure and mixed mathematics provided him with a model for thinking about relationships between geometry and natural philosophy and between politics and history. Marcus P. Adams explores how this understanding of Hobbes's systematic philosophy impacts three long-standing areas of scholarship on Hobbes and the History of Early Modern Philosophy and provides a new view on Hobbes's system .
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Is politics a science? Hobbes's Two Sciences explores how Seventeenth Century Philosopher Thomas Hobbes answered this question in the affirmative by developing a novel theory of knowledge and by finding inspiration in the methods of mathematics and physics.
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1: Introduction: The Unity of Hobbes's Philosophy
2: Prudential Knowledge from Sense and the Mechanical Mind
3: Scientific Knowledge from Making and the Mechanical Mind
4: Demonstrating Scientific Knowledge in Geometry and Civil Philosophy
5: Hobbesian Natural Philosophy as Mixed Mathematics
6: Experience in Hobbesian Civil Philosophy and Civil History
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Marcus P. Adams is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the State University of New York at Albany and former Associate Editor of the journal Hobbes Studies. His research focuses on perception and natural philosophy in Early Modern Philosophy, in particular these areas in the thought of Thomas Hobbes and Margaret Cavendish. He has edited A Companion to Hobbes (2021), and his papers have appeared in journals such as British Journal for the
History of Philosophy, History of Philosophy Quarterly, and Philosophers' Imprint.
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Offers a novel account of the structure and method of Hobbes's philosophy by showing how Hobbes's science of politics is unified with his mathematics, philosophy of language, natural philosophy, and historical explanations
Explores Hobbes's understanding of why his politics was scientific by contextualizing it alongside Hobbes's epistemology
Draws comparisons in methodology between Hobbes's mathematics and natural philosophy and his politics and histories (including Behemoth, his history of the English Civil Wars)
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Product details
ISBN
9780198924685
Published
2025
Publisher
Oxford University Press
Weight
494 gr
Height
243 mm
Width
164 mm
Thickness
20 mm
Age
P, 06
Language
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Innbundet
Number of pages
224
Author