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226 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY This kind of awkwardness unfortunately appears in the translations of many of the letters, especially (and inevitably) in the more formal ones. Perhaps the most successful translations are those of the series of humorous and familiar letters which Erasmus wrote to his closest friend Andrea Ammonio during 1511 and 1512. These, less encumbered with the conventional effusions of the more formal letters, read with much of the vivacity of the originals. It is perhaps unfair to criticize a translation which attempts the impossible: to express convincingly and naturally, and at the same time accurately, a style which we now find entirely foreign to us. Those who want to read and evaluate Erasmus as a literary figure (the role which he himself wanted most of all) will have to go to the Latin text; but for those whose interest in him is philosophical, theological or historical, this volume, its predecessor, and, one hopes, its successors will be indispensable. A final note: the book itself is beautifully printed and refreshingly free of misprints. I noted only one error: "Sympleades" for Symplegades on page 62. LINDAGARDINERJANIK Wellesley College The Politics of Motion: The World of Thomas Hobbes. By Thomas A. Spragens, Jr. (Lexington : The University Press of Kentucky, 1973. Pp. 224. $7.75) Modern commentators on Hobbes have tended to play king's men to his Humpty-Dumpty. Finding his self-proclaimed system a jumble of parts they could not put together, they set about tidying up the mess, throwing aside the indigestible-lookingparts and seeing what might be cooked up from the rest. These cleverly performed and occasionally enlightened efforts have, unfortunately, resulted in nearly as many Hobbeses as there are king's men. The guiding impulse of most of these synthetic reconstructive attempts has been to put together a Hobbes sufficiently modern to be usefully applied to some twentieth-century concern as perceived by the individual interpretor. Hobbes's own clearly stated intentions have been blithely ignored and, needless to say, the historical Hobbes all but lost in the scramble. Standing nearly alone against this tendency has been J. W. N. Watkins with his excellent study Hobbes's System of Ideas. Add now Spragens. As his title announces, Spragens aims to connect the very endpoints of Hobbes's system, namely, motion, where the analytic phase of Hobbes's metaphysical method (if I may put it so) comes to rest, and politics, the crown point of the synthetic phase. Spragens approaches this task, difficult enough in itself, by simultaneously undertaking to resolve the subtle question of Hobbes's relationship to Aristotle. Interestingly , the outcome is considerable enlightenment on both matters. A number of Hobbes scholars have commented on a more positive influence of Aristotelian ideas on Hobbes than is suggested by his unfailingly hostile remarks about Aristotle. But with the exception of Strauss's claim that Hobbes was influenced by the Rhetoric, no careful attempt has been made to bear this out. Certainly no systematic one; and "systematic," Spragens would insist, is precisely the right word. His argument is that Hobbes launches his attack on certain substantive Aristotelian concepts from a base camp squarely in the center of a whole field of Aristotelian metaphysical and epistemological principles. These can be expressed, "rather sketchily" as Spragens says, in six propositions: 1. The created order of the world may be designated by the term nature. 2. Nature is a unified whole, with the same fundamental principles operative throughout. 3. Man himself is a part of nature.... 4. The constituents of nature are a) change or motion, b) substance, or that which remains constant through change, c) accidents, or the perishable attributes of substance.... 5. Methodologically,one must understand nature by looking at its simplestelements, primary conditions and first principles. 6. Among these first principles, the nature of motion is of peculiar importance, for it must be understood before nature can be understood. (Pp. 46-47). BOOK REVIEWS 227 In the Polanyian terms which Spragens uses as part of his heuristic arsenal, these propositions form for Hobbes a tacit background of assumptions on which he relies while offering radically new answers to the substantive questions on which his attention is focused...

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