Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes

Chapter 5 Architectonic Ambitions: Mathematics and the Demotion of Physics

In Chapters 3 and 4 I stressed several points. First, Hobbes did not pursue either descriptive or predictive accounts of natural phenomena. His use for physics was merely to re-create the effects observed in nature. Second, Hobbes assigned a lower rank to physics because it re-creates rather than creates originally . He assigned a higher rank to sciences such as geometry and the science of politics. Hobbes claimed that we know the products of these superior sciences with a greater degree of certainty because we create (or could create) their objects ourselves. The purpose of this chapter is to show that behind these distinctions there was an ambition that can best be described as architectonic.1 Not unlike his former employer Francis Bacon,2 Hobbes wished to fundamentally reorganize the scientific curriculum. Had he been granted the power to reform the schools on the sovereign’s behalf, Hobbes would have tried to impose this new ordering, and new hierarchy, upon the universities. Hobbes did not get his way. Our assessment of his conflicts in these matters, however, should take these ambitious goals into account. It was for Hobbes not merely a matter of whose scientific conclusions were true or false. As the epigraph from De Corpore suggests, it was also a question of how philosophy (science) was to be taught. Which subjects were to come first, and which were to be ranked higher or lower in the academic hierarchy? My interest here is not to defend They that study natural philosophy, study in vain, except they begin at geometry; and such writers or disputers thereof, as are ignorant of geometry, do but make their readers lose their time. —Hobbes, De Corpore 5 architectonic ambitions: mathematics and the demotion of physics 82 p mortal gods Hobbes’s system of sciences, but to show how this architectonic ambition expresses itself with regard to physics and mathematics. The purpose of this inquiry is not to bolster Hobbes’s reputation as a scientist, or to show the compatibility between Hobbes’s pursuit of truth and present-day practice. It is to illustrate the rather aggressive, political, character of his participation in the domain of early modern scientific dispute. Demoting Physics Stephen Gaukroger has observed in his interpretation of Descartes that those who pushed for a mathematicized physics were not merely substituting new tools for physical inquiry, but challenging the very idea of what should count as an explanation in physics.3 The same holds true for Hobbes’s intervention into natural philosophy. Hobbes pursued some radical maneuvers to bring physics into the orbit of (his) mathematics. We can bring Hobbes into better focus by contrasting his claims for a mathematical philosophy with those of the same sixteenth-century Jesuit proponents of mathematics who may have also influenced Descartes.4 The comparison allows us to draw contrasts between Hobbes and earlier mathematically inclined philosophers who wished to insinuate these methods into the study of physical phenomena . Before doing so, however, I will review some of the contemporaneous disputes over mathematics and physics within Hobbes’s career and writings. Because Hobbes has been so often associated with an effort to create a “social physics,”5 these contemporaneous disputes bolster the evidence against this perspective. From Hobbes’s point of view, he was doing more than reforming physics by making it mathematical. He was demoting—not extending—it. He was subordinating it to his own vision of mathematical and philosophical practice, and so we see the sparks fly not merely in his conflicts with “the schools” but in his conflicts with those closely linked with the development of more modern forms of mathematicized physics, such as John Wallis. In works such as part 4 of De Corpore, Decameron Physiologicum, the Anti-White, and to a lesser extent Seven Philosophical Problems, Hobbes takes on a particularly large burden. These are not merely attempts to refute the conclusions of rival philosophers; they are attempts to redefine what it should mean to do physics (i.e., what the schools would have considered natural philosophy ). Thus, these texts do not begin with specific debates among natural architectonic ambitions p 83 philosophers, but with instructions in how to engage in natural philosophy, and how to avoid the errors, absurdities, and corruption of the natural philosophy he has rejected. In the Anti-White Hobbes suggests that “mathematics” is derived from “manthanein, that is, to learn” because all the other sciences...