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7 - HOBBES'S REJECTION OF ELOQUENCE

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 February 2010

Quentin Skinner
Quentin Skinner
Affiliation:
University of Cambridge
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Summary

THE TURN AWAY FROM HUMANISM

While Hobbes was initially formed by the rhetorical culture of Renaissance humanism, there is no doubt that in the 1630s he began to desert the studia humanitatis in favour of a different kind of scientia, and at the same time to react strongly against his earlier intellectual allegiances. The explanation usually offered for this change of direction focuses on Aubrey's muchquoted anecdote about Hobbes's sudden discovery of geometrical method:

Being in a gentleman's library in …, Euclid's Elements lay open, and 'twas the 47 El. libri I. He read the proposition. ‘By G–,’ sayd he, ‘this is impossible!’ So he reads the demonstration of it, which referred him back to such a proposition; which proposition he read. That referred him back to another, which he also read. Et sic deinceps, that at last he was demonstratively convinced of that trueth. This made him in love with geometry.

Aubrey states that this epiphany occurred when Hobbes was forty years old, thereby implying that the library in question must have been that of the Devonshires. But Hobbes himself tells us in his prose Vita that it was in the course of his visit to France with the son of Sir Gervase Clifton in 1629 that ‘I first began to look into Euclid's Elements.’ Hobbes's account tallies with Aubrey's, however, in treating the moment as one of farreaching significance.

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Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes , pp. 250 - 293
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1996

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