Paidea and Identity Essay -- Philosophy Hobbes Papers

Thomas Hobbes, like Francis Bacon before him, disliked Aristotle and scholasticism. They were both quite familiar with the objects of their dislike, having encountered Aristotle and scholasticism first hand at Oxford University. Bacon later described his tutors as "men of sharp wits, shut up in their cells of a few authors, chiefly Aristotle, their Dictator." Bacon clearly saw the extent of new possibilities in thought. He held that Europeans of his time needed to sail beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the limits of ancient learning) into an ocean of new learning. Hobbes, for similar reasons described the universities as places for the production of insignificant speech. Locke also echoed this rejection of scholasticism and contempt for the universities. The purpose of this paper is to talk about this rejection and the ways in which the continuing revolt against university education by Hobbes and Locke has contributed to a new view of the self. Hobbes rejects the teleology of Aristotelian science. His view of man is shaped by Galileo's new insights about motion. His translation of the revolutionary doctrines of physics into claims about man and politics is a most remarkable piece of creative thinking. Life is not aimed at the attainment of the mature state of the species as Aristotle claimed. Man, like other physical objects, keeps moving until something (death, in the case of man) stops him. Yet the reaction to Aristotle and scholasticism was not a matter of simply rejecting the philosophy of Aristotle wholesale. The relation which philosophers had to Aristotelian ideas is much more complex. Philosophers quite typically would reject one piece of Aristotelianism but keep another. Part of the reason for this is that it is not easy... ...ump of matter to another, when the matter changes, so necessarily do the accidents which depend on it. Thus the ship of Theseus case Hobbes claims fits this model of individuation and not the first two. (10) Thus, Hobbes also can give an account of the trinity in terms of these definitions, and it is worth noting that most of the occurences of the term 'person' in the Leviathan are in the context of a discussion of the trinity. But, presumably Hobbes still regards God as a material body, and the three persons of the trinity as different representations in speech and action of that body. (11) John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. Peter Nidditch, Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1972. (II. xxvii. 6. 2-9) Pg. 332 (12) Ibid. (13) Ibid. (18-20) Pg. 332 (14) Ibid. (II. xxvii. 7. 23-24) Pg. 332 (15) Locke, op. cit. (II. xxvii. 9 21-28) Pg. 335