Major Works

• The Elements of Philosophy: De Corpore

    The Elements of Philosophy is composed of three parts, not published in their intended order. De Corpore, which was published in 1655, contains four parts. Part I concerns logic, Part II concerns scientific concepts, Part III concerns geometry and… More

Commentary

• Letter to Marin Mersenne for Hobbes [1641] by Descartes

  - Rene Descartes, in The Correspondence of Thomas Hobbes (Noel Malcolm, ed., Oxford University Press, 1998), pp. 94–101
  A letter from Descartes to Mersenne in which he addresses the objections to his Meditations that Hobbes had previously sent to Mersenne.

• Hobbes’s Doctrine of Method

  - J. Weinberger, "Hobbes's Doctrine of Method," American Political Science Review, Vol. 69, No. 4 (Dec. 1975).
  Excerpt: The rise of modern political science is usually associated with the rise of modern natural science and scientific method. It is often noted that Hobbes was the first modern thinker to apply the new science of nature to the study of politics and,… More

• Meditations on First Philosophy [1641]

  - Rene Descartes, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes (John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, eds., Cambridge University Press, 1984), vol. 2, pp. 1-62
  The publication of these Meditations, in which Descartes famously strives with universal doubt in order to establish what can be known with certainty,  sparked a famous quarrel between Descartes and Hobbes.

• Thomas Hobbes: the Unity of Scientific and Moral Wisdom

  - Gary B. Herbert (University of British Columbia, 1989)
  It is generally believed that Hobbes’s mechanistic physics is at odds with his notorious egoistic psychology, and that the latter cannot support his prescriptive moral theory.  In this book Gary B. Herbert sets forth a new interpretation of Hobbes’s… More

• “Hobbes versus Descartes”

  - Edwin Curley, in Descartes and his Contemporaries (Roger Ariew and Marjorie Grene, eds., University of Chicago Press, 1995), pp. 97-109
  An analysis of the exchange between Hobbes and Descartes sparked by Descartes’ publication of his Meditations in 1641.

• Made with Words: Hobbes on Language, Mind, and Politics

  - Phillip Pettit (Princeton University Press, 2009)
  Pettit argues that it was Hobbes, not later thinkers like Rousseau, who invented the invention of language thesis–the idea that language is a cultural innovation that transformed the human mind. The invention, in Hobbes’s story, is a double-edged… More

• The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes

  - Samuel I. Mintz (Cambridge University Press, 2010)
  Mintz, in examining these seventeenth-century reactions to Hobbes, sets him against his intellectual background and so gives an added dimension to his thought, captures the ideological excitement of the seventeenth-century critics, and reawakens the crucial… More

• Hobbes, Bramhall and the Politics of Liberty and Necessity: A Quarrel of the Civil Wars and Interregnum

  - Nicholas D. Jackson (Cambridge University Press, 2011)
  This 2007 book was the first full account of one of the most famous quarrels of the seventeenth century, that between the philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) and the Anglican archbishop of Armagh, John Bramhall (1594-1663). This analytical narrative… More

• The Platonian Leviathan

  - Leon Harold Craig, The Platonian Leviathan, (University of Toronto Press, 2013)
  From the publisher: Thomas Hobbes’s influential political treatise, Leviathan, was first published in 1651. Many scholars have since credited him with a mechanistic outlook towards human nature that established the basis of modern Western political… More