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In this chapter I intend to start picking up the stakes that mark a false boundary within our understanding of Hobbes. This boundary is between Hobbes’s alleged humanist “phase” and subsequent “phases” in which Hobbes is said to have (at least for a time) abandoned humanism for mathematical reasoning for more modern scientific endeavors. As regards mathematics and humanism , Hobbes had a single phase. He never ceased to be a humanist. Having not ceased to be a humanist, Hobbes did not make a return journey. I do not deny that his thought changed over time, or that he became increasingly interested in harnessing the power of mathematical reasoning and defending his reputation for possessing this power. I do deny, however, that we can adequately understand Hobbes’s affinities for mathematics without understanding the affinity for mathematics of the humanists who had preceded him and which continued to inform his conception of what mathematical, and scientific, thought was meant to achieve. These humanist affinities for mathematics , cultivated among the gentlemanly patrons and pedants, have been known to others, but they have been erased in the grand narratives that inform Hobbes scholarship. They need to be recovered and juxtaposed with Hobbes’s thought. In this chapter I undertake to recover some aspects of the humanist face of Hobbes’s mathematics. After further consideration of Hobbes’s philosophy , Chapter 8 and the appendix on the Hobbes-Wallis dispute bookend the process by adding to the portrait. Hobbes, Humanism, and Modernity’s Abrupt Beginnings There is a strong temptation to describe the history of Hobbes and geometry as a conversion story.1 Aubrey’s account of Hobbes’s discovery of geometry seems to offer a glimpse of a key moment in the history of the scientific revolution. Aubrey writes that he was “40 yeares old before he looked on 2 the humanist face of hobbes’s mathematics, part 1 10 p mortal gods geometry; which happened accidentally. Being in a gentleman’s library in . . . , [Aubrey’s ellipsis] Euclid’s Elements lay open, and ‘twas the 47 El. Libri I. He read the proposition. ‘By G—,’ sayd he, ‘this is impossible!’ So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry.”2 There are good reasons to doubt this story of a sudden conversion to the church of mathematical worship. Book 1, proposition 47, of Euclid is the Pythagorean Theorem. Upon its discovery, Pythagoras is said to have sacrificed one hundred oxen to the gods. Aubrey’s account, with its reference to divinity and Hobbes’s joy upon seeing the truth of something he first thought impossible, may be a creative seventeenth-century inversion allowing us to imagine Hobbes experiencing the same revelation centuries later. This story, which has Hobbes encountering a book of geometry in the same way enthusiasts encounter an open Bible, bespeaks as much humanist continuity as it does sudden transformation.3 Our first doubts, however, should be cast upon our own view of what it must have meant to be mathematical. It is incorrect, in spite of Aubrey’s account, to assume that Hobbes’s love of mathematical ways and practices truly began with a love affair with Euclid’s geometry. This judgment is affirmed by looking into the mathematical affinities of his contemporaries , and indeed Hobbes’s own account of his early interests. Hobbes reports his youthful devotion to the things produced by practical mathematicians : maps, celestial charts, and geography were strong preoccupations during his time at Oxford.4 In the very year of the supposed conversion, 1629, Hobbes had already made himself an accomplished practitioner of a mode of mathematically informed humanism. In that year he published his translation of Thucydides. This work is rightly viewed as a sign of Hobbes’s strong commitment to humanist learning in his early years. Aside from turning Thucydides’s ancient Greek into English, Hobbes was particularly proud of having created an accompanying map of ancient Greece. Unlike other maps available, he claimed, his would help readers of the history by adequately locating the regions that corresponded to the place-names in Thucydides.5 While the map was not the work of his own surveys, except through Thucydides and other historical accounts of the geography,6 it was something we can now recognize...

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