Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

224 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
1628. He travelled to Holland to meet, among others, scientists sympathetic to
the Copernican approach to astronomy. The one who most impressed him was
the physician and savant Isaac Beeckman, who ten years earlier had been
Descartes’s mentor. Beeckman discussed the physical problem of free fall with
Gassendi and spoke with approval of Epicurus. It was apparently after this
meeting 4 that Gassendi began to think of publishing a treatise favourable to
Epicurus. That this work on Epicurus was supposed to take further the anti-
Aristotelianism of what he had already published is suggested by the fact that at
first Gassendi planned to bring out a demythologized life of Epicurus and an
apology for Epicureanism as an appendix to the Exercitationes. As early as
1630, however, this modest project had given way to the much more ambitious
one of writing a perfectly comprehensive exposition and defence of
Epicurus, something that could articulate a positive philosophy to rival
Aristotle’s but without its pretensions to demonstrativeness or to acquaintance
with essences that transcended appearance.
Now a little later than Gassendi Hobbes also began to plan a large-scale work:
an exposition of the ‘elements’ of a non-Aristotelian philosophy. Perhaps by the
late 1630s he had completed an outline that divided the elements into three
sections, on body, man and citizen. None of these, however, was derived from
traditional philosophy. Indeed, when it came to the elements expounded in the
first section, Hobbes claimed that they could be collected together by reflection
on the mind’s contents in the abstract. In the Epistle Dedicatory of De Corpore,
the book that opened the trilogy, Hobbes likened the process of deriving the
concepts of first philosophy to the creation described in Genesis. From the
inchoate and undifferentiated material of sense, distinction and order would be
created in the form of a list of definitions of the most general concepts for
understanding body. In arriving at the foundations of his philosophy de novo,
Hobbes was closer to Descartes than to Gassendi. As in Descartes, an entirely
ahistorical and abstract starting point is adopted and this proclaims the novelty of
the philosophy subsequently developed, and its independence of the approved
learned authors, Aristotle, Ptolemy and Galen.
The intention of breaking with such authorities was underlined in Hobbes’s
writings in his account of correct teaching or demonstration. ‘The infallible sign
of teaching exactly, and without error’ Hobbes writes in The Elements of Law, ‘is
this: that no man hath ever taught the contrary…’ (Pt 1, ch. 13, iii, 65). Or, as he
goes on to put it, ‘the sign of [teaching] is no controversy’ (ibid., 66). Hobbes
goes on to explain what it is about the content and format of exact teaching or
demonstration that keeps controversy from breaking out. He considers the
practice of successful teachers and observes that they
proceed from most low and humble principles, evident even to the meanest
capacity; going on slowly, and with most scrupulous ratiocination (viz.)
from the imposition of names they infer the truth of their first proposition;