Routledge History of Philosophy Volume IV

246 RENAISSANCE AND SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY RATIONALISM
possibility of science. We have already seen that Gassendi was attracted to
Epicureanism partly because it could rival Aristotle’s philosophy, and because
Gassendi was from early on dissatisfied with Aristotelianism. In Hobbes’s case
equally the departures from Aristotle’s theory of causation and the categories, as
well as the theory that man is naturally sociable and that one exercises the duties
of citizenship by judging and legislating rather than obeying, are very clear and
well documented.
Hobbes does not believe, as people do who take scepticism seriously, that one
can live long or well by appearances alone. He thinks that to live and live well in
both nature and society one needs science, that is, some methodical way of
finding the causes of appearances and the consequences of one’s actions. But he
also thinks, this time very much as Gassendi does, that, except with regard to the
appearances of things we make, appearances of artefacts, science does not reveal
the necessary causes of appearances; and though he believes that science can be
acquired by human beings he does not think that they have a natural aptitude for
it. Similarly, though he thinks that virtue can be acquired, and even that there can
be a science of virtue in the form of the system of the laws of nature, he does not
think that the virtues can be learned by simple habituation, or that there is the
relation of virtue to pleasure or virtue to personal judgement and experience that
Aristotle insists upon. In all of these respects he is antiAristotelian.
With Gassendi Hobbes is a mechanistic and-Aristotelian in natural
philosophy. He is a different kind of anti-Aristotelian in civil philosophy. In civil
philosophy he is anti-Aristotelian in redrawing the distinction between natural
and artificial so that politics no longer falls on the ‘natural’ side of the divide;
aptness for the polity is not written into human nature, according to Hobbes: man
has to be made sociable and the order with the polity is not a natural one either,
but one that is artificial and expressible in the terms of a contract. Gassendi, too,
is a contract theorist, but apparently not one who invests the fact that contracts
are made and states manufactured with anti-Aristotelian significance. For him
entering into a contract can be the expression of natural sociableness, albeit
understood in an Epicurean rather than Aristotelian way.
ABBREVIATIONS
The following abbreviations are used in references. Gassendi: Op. Omn.—Opera
Omnia (Lyon, 1658), 6 vols, references are by volume and page number; Brush—
The Selected Writings of Pierre Gassendi, trans. C.Brush (New York, Johnson
Reprint, 1972); IL—Institutio Logica, ed. and trans. Howard Jones (Assen, Van
Gorcum, 1981). Hobbes: EL—The Elements of Law Natural and Politic, ed.
F.Tönnies (London, Simpkin & Marshall, 1889), references are by part, chapter,
section and Tönnies page number; L—Leviathan, or the Matter, Form and
Power of Commonwealth, Ecclesiastical and Civil, references are by chapter and
page number to the edition in vol. 3 of the English Works (E), ed. Sir
W.Molesworth (London, 1869), 11 vols; De corp. —Elementorum Philosophiae,