Major Works

• The Elements of Philosophy: De Corpore

  - Hobbes, Thomas. Human Nature and De Corpore Politico. Edited by J. C. A. Gaskin. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994.
  Thomas Hobbes’s De Corpore (Latin for “On the Body”), published in 1655, is the first part of his trilogy on philosophy, which includes De Homine (“On Man”) and De Cive (“On the Citizen”). In De Corpore, Hobbes develops… More

Commentary

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

  - 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… More

• 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.

• “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.

• “First Philosophy and the Foundations of Knowledge”

  - Yves Charles Zarka, in The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Tom Sorell, ed., Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 62-85
  Zarka considers the relation between Hobbes’s “rational reconstruction of knowledge” and his concept of “first philosophy,” focusing in particular on the  development of his first philosophy, with comparison to Aristotle and… More