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I have argued that Hobbes cultivated useful learning as a kind of possession. It was a possession that could help establish and constitute the possessor’s identity . A person could be known by the practices and talents made possible by it. Attentiveness to these connections and a claim to be able to cultivate these talents in others were a part of what it meant to be a humanist. This aspect of humanism carried over into Hobbes’s approach to philosophy, and to mathematics in particular. In Chapter 3 I described the prized possession Hobbes promised to the students of his philosophy: they would learn to imitate and even rival God. What are we to make of a philosopher who makes such claims? They would be ridiculous were they made today. Chapter 3 has already located these claims within a relatively narrow philosophical framework in which they can make sense, but there is more work to be done if Hobbes’s claim of divine imitation is to be taken seriously. Today it would be difficult to resist the conclusion that any philosopher making a claim to imitate God has lost his way. The matter becomes all the more pressing when we consider that Hobbes expected his philosophy to yield practical results. One might be driven to mockery. Did Hobbes, great imitator of God, expect to exercise supernatural powers? We know from the prior chapter that his philosophy set itself to the task of manipulating material causes, but under what circumstances would such a claim to manipulate causes be credibly compared to exercising godlike Law is for subjects and if it is my will, I can abolish old law and impose new; the universe is divided: Heaven belongs to Jove, but the scepter of worldly power is mine. —nero, in monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea (1642), act 1, scene 9 4 king of the children of pride: the imitation of god in context 56 p mortal gods powers? The chief purpose of this chapter is to contextualize claims to imitate God, to locate Hobbes’s place within these contexts, and to speak to the practicalities involved in implementing Hobbes’s political program. A second question is bound inextricably to claims to imitate God. Not only must we learn how to take Hobbes seriously when he makes such promises, but we must also turn to the conception of human being (we typically speak of Hobbes’s conception of “man”) that accompanies such claims. This is an immense topic that cannot be exhausted here. I will therefore limit my discussion to those elements that relate to my own claims about his science. The conventionally understood Hobbes is quite well known for his pessimistic views of human nature. In Chapter 3 I have shown that Hobbes’s approach to science prohibits claims to factual knowledge. These basic claims about human nature therefore exist in some tension with Hobbes’s own philosophical methods. Nevertheless, these basic claims have filled an important gap between Hobbes’s philosophy and how many readers imagine his political program coming to fruition. They have allowed Hobbes’s twentieth- and twenty-firstcentury scientific admirers to see him as working within a familiar framework. Hobbes’s “man” is calculating, self-interested, self-preserving, fearful, and at least potentially rational. In light of these characteristics, we ask, what kind of behavior, what choices, can we reasonably expect from such a creature? Critically engaging Hobbes has therefore often been an exercise in either adjusting his views on human nature, or arguing that his conclusions about what we would or should do (to exit the state of nature) do not necessarily follow from his premises. When Hobbes discusses human nature and formulates philosophically or scientifically guided political advice, is he working from the same conception of “man” that our contemporaries have in mind? Following Foucault on a general level, we ought to consider the possibility that “man” is not a universal , but a historically situated entity, and that the calculable “man” of today’s social sciences and philosophy may not have been what Hobbes had in mind when he wrote of human beings.1 Indeed, an understanding of the framework in which it makes sense to compare human talents with God’s bespeaks a different conception, one that operates by its own logic and concerns itself with a rather different set of questions. Such a conception begets questions such as “Where do we stand within a grand hierarchy?” Are we located above animals? Thinkers such as...

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