The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes

It was as a political thinker that Thomas Hobbes first came to prominence, and it is as a political theorist that he is most studied today. Yet the range of his writings extends well beyond morals and politics. Hobbes had distinctive views in metaphysics and epistemology, and wrote about such subjects as history, law, and religion. He also produced full-scale treatises in physics, optics, and geometry. All of these areas are covered in this Companion, most in considerable detail. The volume also reflects the multidisciplinary nature of current Hobbes scholarship by drawing together perspectives that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of science and mathematics, intellectual historians, political scientists, and literary theorists.

• Comprehensive, systematic and accessible • Presents a much broader picture of Hobbes than is found in current literature where the focus is usually on Hobbes’s political writings • Reflects a multidisciplinary approach to Hobbes, embracing the work of philosophers, political scientists, historians of science and ideas, theologians, and literary theorists

1. A summary biography of Hobbes Noel Malcolm; 2. Hobbes’s scheme of the sciences Tom Sorell; 3. First philosophy and the foundations of knowledge Yves Charles Zarka; 4. Hobbes and the method of natural science Douglas Jesseph; 5. Hobbes and mathematics Hardy Grant; 6. Hobbes on light and vision Jan Prins; 7. Hobbes’s psychology Bernard Gert; 8. Hobbes’s moral philosophy Richard Tuck; 9. Hobbes’s political philosophy Alan Ryan; 10. Lofty science and local politics Johann Sommerville; 11. Hobbes on law M. M. Goldsmith; 12. History in Hobbes’s thought Luc Borot; 13. Hobbes on rhetoric Victoria Silver; 14. Hobbes on religion Patricia Springborg.

‘… a substantial reference work for quite advanced students, providing articles on all the widely varied aspects of the work of seventeenth-century England’s most outstanding philosopher prior to Locke.’

– Robert Burns, The Expository Times