Draft Outline for Talk/Paper – Please Do Not Cite without Permission of Author Marcus Adams

Marcus Adams, SUNY Albany

Email: madams2@albany.edu

Draft Talk Outline, International Hobbes Association

Virtual Conference, January 2021

“Hobbes’s Mechanico-Perspectivalist Epistemology”

CLAIM 1 (focus of paper): Hobbesian knowledge (scientia) depends upon both the external
world and a knower’s aims. Those aims determine what sort of active abstraction serves as a
foundation for a construction as well as the stopping point for a construction.
CLAIM 2 (discussed briefly): Understanding Hobbes’s epistemology helps us understand his
metaphysical commitments, providing an ancillary reason to reject viewing him as a reductionist.

Hobbesian Scientia is concerned with…

 CAUSES: “We are said to know [scire] some effect when we know what its
causes are, in what subject they are, in what subject they introduce the effect
and how they do it. Therefore, this is the knowledge [scientia] τοῦ διότι or of
causes. All other knowledge [cognitio], which is called τοῦ ὅτι, is either sense
experience or imagination remaining in sense experience or memory” (De
corpore VI.1; OL I.58-59; Hobbes 1981, 287-289).
 AIMS: Scientia is for getting something accomplished: “[k]nowledge is for
the sake of power [Scientia propter potentiam]” (OL I.6; Hobbes 1981, 183).

I. “The confused abyss of your thoughts and experiences”: Sense, Cognitio, and
Passivity
a. All conceptions, or ideas, come from sense or are derived from those that do
(2012, 22; 1651, 3).
b. Thinking of conceptions as images (phantasms) makes clear that “the object is
one thing, the image or fancy is another” (2012, 24; 1651, 3).
c. This appearance/reality gap seems to place humans in a worrisome position; some
see Hobbes’s epistemology as concerned with external world skepticism (e.g.,
Tuck 1988, 37-41).
i. But Hobbes does not have the worries of Descartes’ Mediator. Implicit in
the first philosophy of De corpore is that the world that caused the
conceptions in the lone individual’s mind did exist at one point (see Sorell
1995, 92).
ii. Instead, Hobbes is concerned with what humans can know about external
objects given that the world exists
d. Hobbes’s much-discussed philosophical psychology:
i. Sense experiences produce imagistic conceptions

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Draft Outline for Talk/Paper – Please Do Not Cite without Permission of Author Marcus Adams

ii. There is a continuum of motions responsible for mental acts, such as

imagination and memory (Lev 2). We call something ‘memory’ when
viewing it as “fading, old, and past” (Hobbes 2012, 28; 1651, 5)
iii. The continuum is justified by an a priori principle (2012, 26; 1651, 4).
iv. Adding up memories yields prudence (Hobbes 2012, 28; 1651, 5).
e. An obvious assumption (not unique to Hobbes): human and animal minds have an
innate ability to group similar conceptions together. Petit calls this the “passive
association of ideas” (2008, 15).
f. My claim: Hobbes’s more significant assumption (and preceding the assumption
above in e): the decay of motions from sense to memory automatically abstracts
the details of vivid, highly-detailed sense experiences in a way that is both
advantageous to human/animal knowers and that is consistent over a series of
experiences. I.e., passive abstraction (=decay) precedes passive association and
without it there could be no associations made.

II. “You must do what those who make statues do”: Active Abstraction, Scientia,
and Making
a. Background: Does language enable activity on the part of the mind?
i. Petit links the move from passive associations to active mental
engagement capable of generality to language: “I will have a general
conception of something insofar as I contemplate it as the bearer, referent,
or denotatum of a general or common name, whether this be a simple
name like man or a compound like bachelor (DCr 2.4)” (2008, 31).
Similarly, Leijenhorst (2001, 94; 2007, 97) claims Hobbes supplanted the
active intellect with language.
ii. Reply: There are no “general conceptions” for Hobbes. Only particular
conceptions considered in different ways (some considered in general
ways, some even universal like Hobbes’s “simplest conceptions” of DCo
VI.6). But I leave language to the side and here discuss Hobbes’s device
of “considering as,” which I take for granted precedes language and
grounds scientia. Language enters only as a device to help one remember
the discoveries at the conceptual level.

b. Scientia as mentioned already is causal knowledge. If all knowledge were

association-based prudence (and thus cognitio), causal claims would fall prey to
worries like Hume had about ‘cause’.

c. Principle of Hobbesian Scientia: only the maker of something knows its

causes
i. Only God knows the actual causes of natural phenomena since God is
Creator (humans posit possible causes in natural philosophy)
ii. Human makers imitate God’s creation: “If you are going to pay serious
attention to philosophy, let your reason hover over the confused abyss of

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Draft Outline for Talk/Paper – Please Do Not Cite without Permission of Author Marcus Adams

your thoughts and experiences. The confused things must be shaken

violently, distinguished, and ordered, having been marked with their own
names, that is, in method it must be according to the creation of things
themselves.” (De corpore, To the reader)

iii. Just as the Creator God of Genesis shaped what was already there,
humans shape what is already there (particular conceptions).

iv. Hobbes’s other analogy from “To the reader” of DCo: “you must do what
those who make statues do, who, carving out the unnecessary parts, do
not make the likeness but discover it”

v. My claim: “carving out the unnecessary parts” and shaking violently the
“confused things” is a pre-linguistic ability to “consider as” which must
precede instances of making.
1. This is active: Differs from passive sense/memory/prudence
because it is from industry (2012, 72; 1651, 21) and is cultivated
(Hobbes 1981, 175; OL I.2). Not passive abstraction like “decay”.
2. Knowers must “carve out” because nature presents a complicated
reality. We abstract to consider only bodies as abstract
instantaneous points or human bodies as in their natural state.
3. Only after we consider bodies in this way, can we make something
like a complex geometrical figure.

vi. But constructions (cases of making) must also result from human aims:
1. Recall “[k]nowledge is for the sake of power [Scientia propter
potentiam]” (OL I.6; Hobbes 1981, 183).

2. My claim: We could imagine examples that might fulfill the

making requirement of scientia but fail the aims requirement (e.g.,
abstract ‘rational’ away, leaving only ‘animate’ and ‘body’ and
construct from human bodies considered without rationality).

3. What counts as the two scientiae: 1) making geometry a science by

including causes into definitions (generative definitions); and 2)
making the laws of nature which are the cause of peace

4. These count as scientiae because 1) we make from actively

abstracted foundations but also because 2) they result from human
aims (to make nature intelligible with geometrical principles and to
satisfy the three passions that “encline men to Peace”).

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Draft Outline for Talk/Paper – Please Do Not Cite without Permission of Author Marcus Adams

vii. Hobbes’s direct claims about making and scientia:

1. “Geometry therefore is demonstrable for the lines and figures from
which we reason are drawn and described by ourselves and civil
philosophy is demonstrable because we make the commonwealth
ourselves” (Six Lessons…; EW VII.184).
2. Geometry is demonstrable because “the causes of the properties
that individual figures have belong to them because we ourselves
draw the lines” and “politics and ethics … can be demonstrated a
priori; because we ourselves make the principles — that is, the
causes of justice (namely laws and covenants) — whereby it is
known what justice and equity, and their opposites injustice and
inequity, are” (OL II.93-94; Hobbes 1994, 41-42).

III. How is this “Mechanical”? How is this “Perspectival”?

a. This is mechanical philosophy because of Hobbes’s commitment to understand

wholes through (conceptual) parts. We gain scientia by putting together parts to
make a whole. In demonstration, this is just synthesis.
i. Square example:
“…we have these universals or components of every material
thing: line, plane (in which a surface is contained), being bounded,
angle, rectitude, and equality. If anyone finds the causes of these,
he will put them together as the cause of the square” (Hobbes
1981, 293; OL I.61)
ii. Human example (not bodily parts; “nature” and not “bulk”):
“… the causes of the parts are better known than the causes of the
whole. For the cause of the whole consists of the causes of the
parts; and it is necessary that the components be known earlier
than the composite. But by ‘parts’ I understand in this place not the
parts of the thing itself but the parts of its nature, so that by the
parts of a man, I do not understand head, shoulders, arms, and so
on, but figure, quantity, motion, sensation, reasoning, and similar
things, which are accidents which assembled at the same time
constitute the whole man — not his bulk but his nature” (De
Corpore VI.2; Hobbes 1981, 291; OL I.60).
iii. And related to ii above: Humans in their natural state…
1. Thus we have considered the nature of Man so far as was requisite
for the finding out the first and most simple elements wherein the
compositions of Politick Rules and Laws are lastly resolved; which
was my present purpose (End of EL I.XIII, 1650, 170; in Tönnies
at Hobbes 1928, 191 fn. 11).

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Draft Outline for Talk/Paper – Please Do Not Cite without Permission of Author Marcus Adams

b. This is perspectival because although sense experience is clearly foundational

for Hobbes, in actual practice he does not treat sense as offering a single
foundation. Hobbesian epistemology is thus (unsurprisingly) not a
foundationalism like what Descartes’ meditator discovers.
i. One’s perspective determines how one employs the device of “considering
as”
ii. Different persons will take the same sense-dependent conceptions in
different ways. Their differing aims will cause them to focus on different
aspects of the same sense experience and they will thus “carve out”
different parts. Likewise, the same person will do so from one day to
another.
iii. Were humans otherwise than they are (e.g., if they did not have the three
passions that “encline men to Peace”; 2012, 196; 1651, 63), then their
aims would differ and what counted as scientia would differ.

IV. Conclusion: Lessons for Thinking about Hobbes’s Metaphysics

a. Understanding Hobbes’s epistemology in this way reinforces that he is no

corpuscularian (there is no privileged explanatory level) (DialPhys, OL IV.244–
245; DCo 27.1, OL I.362–364, EW I.445–448), nor was he generally a
reductionist as many have claimed.

b. One’s aims determine the “level” of the explanans:

i. If interested in Earth’s annual path, “consider” the Earth as if it were a
single geometrical point (OL I.98–99)
ii. If interested in Earth’s diurnal motion, then consider it as a body moving
with “simple circular motion” (OL IV.252) composed of multiple points
iii. If interested in how to make peace, consider human bodies as persons and
then consider them as in their natural state.

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