Abstract
Both Galileo Galilei and William Harvey were greatly admired by Hobbes,1 who regarded the former as ‘the greatest scientist of all time’ (Anti-White, 123). According to Aubrey’s account:
when [Hobbes] was at Florence he contracted friendship with the famous Galileo Galilei, whom he extremely venerated and magnified and not only as he was a prodigious wit, but for his sweetness of nature and manners (Brief Lives, 161).
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Notes
On this, see John Watkins, Hobbes’s System of Ideas: A Study in the Political Significance of Philosophical Theories, 2nd ed. (London: Hutchinson, 1973), pp. 34–42.
For a survey of the reactions of Hobbes’s contemporaries to his theories, see, for example, Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1962).
In 1936 Leo Strauss, for example, in the preface to The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. Its basis and its genesis. (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1963; first published in 1936), makes clear that the ‘particular object’ of his study is to show ‘that the real basis of Hobbes’s political philosophy is not modern science’ (p. ix).
In a similar vein, Howard Warrender in The Political Philosophy of Hobbes. His theory of Obligation. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, first published 1957), argues that if in fact Hobbes wanted to derive his moral theory from an empirical theory ‘he must be held to have failed in his main enterprise’ (p. 6),
Frithiof Brandt, Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature. (Copenhagen: Levin and Munksgaard, 1927), pp. 290–91.
Among the exceptions, see William Sacksteder, ‘Hobbes’ Geometrical Objects’, Philosophy of Science, 48 (1981) 573–90,
and Martin Bertman, Body and Cause in Hobbes: Natural and Political. (Wakefield, NH: Longwood Academic, 1991).
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© 2000 Gabriella Slomp
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Slomp, G. (2000). The Co-ordinates of Man: Time and Space. In: Thomas Hobbes and the Political Philosophy of Glory. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333984437_2
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