Philosophy in the seventeenth century is often, and with reason, characterized as a collection of grand systems devoted to an all-encompassing account of the world and its workings. Yet even in an era that featured such systematic thinkers as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz, Hobbes is noteworthy for his “big picture” approach to philosophy. His tripartite Elements of Philosophy features the treatises De Corpore, De Homine, and De Cive, which were presented to the public as an exposition of all the philosophy worth knowing. Indeed, one might suspect that by entitling his system Elements of Philosophy, Hobbes was attempting to do for philosophy what Euclid’s Elements had done for geometry. The structure of the three works in Hobbes’s Elements reflects his conception of the structure of knowledge: beginning with a treatise on the nature of body, Hobbes next proceeded to examine the nature of humans (i.e., animated, rational bodies), and thence to a discourse on the nature of the commonwealth (the artificial body bound together by human covenants). In consequence, Hobbes’s De Corpore—a dissertation on the nature of body—occupies the foundational place in his system, and its foundational status is due to the fact that Hobbes held to a strict materialism in which only body is real, so that all else must be accounted for in terms of the action of bodies.
...MoreBook De Risi, Vincenzo (2015) Mathematizing Space: The Objects of Geometry from Antiquity to the Early Modern Age.
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