HOBBES, THOMAS (b. Malmesbury, England, 5 April 1588; d. Hardwick, Derbyshire, England, 4 December 1679), political philosophy, moral philosophy, geometry, optics.

    Hobbes. He grossly underestimated its scope and was suspicious of all attempts to “arithmetize” geometry. He thought of algebra as a minor branch of arithmetic; Wallis' “scab of symbols” simply disfigured the page, “as if a hen had been scraping there.”16 Nor did he appreciate the significance of Wallis' contributions, published in Arithmetica infinitorum (1655), toward the development of the differential calculus, although Hobbes's speculations in optics of an earlier stage in his life seemed to be leading him in the direction Wallis was taking.

In fact, Hobbes, in his sixties when he began his dispute with Wallis, was out of touch with the generation of rising young scientists and mathematicians. He was not opposed to experimentalism on principle, but he had no natural sympathy for it and considered that most of the experiments performed by fellows and correspondents of the Royal Society were either ill-conceived and poorly executed, or else they reached conclusions long ago arrived at by Hobbes through the use of his unaided reason. In this spirit he wrote “Dialogus physicus, sive de natura aeris” (1616), a brief but barbed attack on Robert Boyle's experiments on the vacuum pump, to which Boyle replied calmly, though forcefully, in Examen of Mr. Hobbes, His Dialogus (1662) and Dissertation on Vacuum Against Mr. Hobbes (1674). Not surprisingly, Hobbes was excluded from membership in the Royal Society, a fact which he resented, although he publicly declared that he was lucky to be out of it.

Hobbes's last years were thus clouded with controversy, but they were not without their simple pleasures and rewards. He lived comfortably on the Cavendish estates in Chatsworth and Hardwick Hall and, more frequently, in the duke of Devonshire's house on the Strand in London. He enjoyed long walks; he played tennis until he was seventy-five; and he had an abiding love of music, listening to it whenever he could and playing on his own bass viol. Capable as he was of holding his own in public controversy, and sparkling with wit in table talk, he was always gentle with people of lower rank or inferior education. He was a bachelor, but according to Aubrey he was not a “woman-hater”; and it is possible that he had a natural daughter whom he cherished.

In his eighties, mostly to amuse himself, Hobbes published translations of the Iliad and the Odyssey. And when he was ninety he published Decameron physiologicum, a set of dialogues on physical principles containing also a last salvo fired off against Wallis. He died of a stroke at the age of ninety-one.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. ORIGINAL WORKS.

Hobbes's works include De cive (Paris, 1642); De corpore politico, or the Elements of Law (London, 1650); Leviathan (London, 1651); De corpore (London, 1655); Problemata physica (London, 1662); Lux mathematica (London, 1672); Decameron physiologicum (London, 1678); and Behemoth (London, 1679). The standard ed. of Hobbes's works is by William Molesworth, 16 vols. (London, 1839-1845), but it has inaccuracies and omissions. A comprehensive modern ed., to be published at Oxford, is being prepared by Howard Warrender. The standard bibliography of Hobbes's works is by Hugh Macdonald (London, 1952). Important modern eds. of Leviathan are by Michael Oakeshott (Oxford, 1946) and by C. B. Macpherson (Baltimore, 1968). A modern translation particularly valuable for its full annotations and attention to textual problems is François Tricaud, Leviathan: Traité de la matière, de la forme et du pouvoir de la république ecclésiastique et civile (Paris, 1971).

II. SECONDARY LITERATURE.

Contemporary biographies of Hobbes are John Aubrey, Brief Lives, A. Clark, ed. (Oxford, 1898); and Richard Blackbourne, in Vitae Hobbianae auctarium (London, 1681). The most important nineteenth-and early twentieth-century studies of Hobbes, in