Descartes, René. “Letter to Marin Mersenne for Hobbes [1641].” In The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes, edited by Noel Malcolm, 94–101. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

During the preparation of René Descartes’s Meditations on First Philosophy (1641), Thomas Hobbes was invited, along with other prominent philosophers, to contribute objections to Descartes’s work. Hobbes, known for his materialist and mechanistic philosophy, challenged Descartes’s reliance on the immaterial nature of the soul and his foundational claim “I think, therefore I am” (cogito, ergo sum). Hobbes’s objections questioned the methodological and metaphysical assumptions underlying Descartes’s arguments, particularly critiquing the separation of mind and body. Descartes addressed these critiques in his Second Replies and through a letter to Marin Mersenne, a mutual correspondent who facilitated this intellectual exchange.

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