 The beginning of his literary career is pretty uncontroversial. He translated Thucydides' history of the Peloponnesian War, which is the first or second real work of history. Hobbes is actually most famous for the set of objections he wrote to Descartes' work, Meditations on First Philosophy. So Descartes circulated a manuscript of the meditations to other learned scholars and philosophers, and Hobbes wrote a set of objections, basically saying this is all stupid and wrong, and vehemently rejecting key parts of it. And then Descartes responded to that in the published replies to the objections. And as far as Descartes was concerned, it was over. He published his replies, no point in going on. But of course, Hobbes had answers to those replies and kept writing and expanding on his objections to it. The first work that he wrote of his own, not focused on a translation or objections to somebody else, is the work or reading of his in the class, which we collectively called the elements of the law, natural and politic, but which consists, essentially, of two different books, one called Human Nature and the other called On the Political Body, or De Corporé Politico. Now, there's a lot of archaisms, and you may have noticed that there's these funny English expressions that he uses from the 17th century. And so there's actually a project by some early modern philosophers, one in particular, but others that joined him, to translate Hobbes and translate Hume, because they have these archaic modes of expression, saying, thy, and thinketh, and things like that. And so some people have translated this English work into English. We're using the actual work itself. I think that those authors have actually distorted those works and don't cite a translation of Hobbes, cite in your research and work in this class the work itself. This is not a translation. These are actually the words he wrote down. But still, I can gloss some of these expressions for you and make them a little bit clearer. So I think, I've never heard anyone say this, but I think the actual title makes more sense if we say something like the elements of natural and political law, human nature and the political body. And the idea is that there are natural laws that govern how our bodies work and how our senses work and even how we interact with the external world. And Hobbes wants to come up with a theory of that. And then there is also an analogous entity which is the political body, which we sometimes use the pretentious French expression body politic for. And we conceive of that as being sort of like a human body. And this is so deeply embedded in our conceptual scheme of talking about politics that we don't even realize it anymore. So when we talk about the head of state, why do we call the head of state? And say he's the head of it? Well, because we're conceiving of it as a political body of which one individual is the head of state, the other elements like the legislature and the judiciary are sometimes called the organs of government as if they're parts of what make this political body function. And there are other analogies and metaphors about politics. We talk about decapitating the state, meaning eliminating its leadership, the arms of the state and so forth, meaning the extensions of its power. So how about the constitution? So constitution literally means the organization of a human body. That's your constitution, how it all works, the circulatory system, the skeletal systems, and so forth. By analogy, we have this idea of a written constitution which explains how the different parts or organs of the political body interact. So the idea is that we should come up with a theory about how individual bodies function and then about how these bodies went amass together into a unified political body function. And then we have natural laws for the one. And by analogy, we have laws of nature or natural laws that govern the other. And so that is the project of this book, is to come up with a complete theory that starts from the most basic aspects of how a human body is ordered to how an entire political system and a state is ordered. But even before the first chapter, he has this dedication to William Cavendish, who is his supporter and who's paying the upkeep of philosophers, like philosophers can't just go out and get jobs like normal people, so they need rich people to support them so that they can write these books and so forth. And so he writes this kind of thawning dedication to him, my most honored lord and so forth. But there's actually some substantial philosophy that takes place in that short dedication that's about a page long. So here he says that basically there's two parts of human nature, reason and passion. And these correspond to two different kinds of reasoning and scientific knowledge. On the one hand, corresponding to reason is mathematics, which is concerned with numbers, figures, and motion. And none of that is controversial. It's a matter of proof. Those who investigate these sciences and set down their proofs all agree about what the standards of this are. And the resolution isn't based on speeches in which somebody tries to be more convincing rhetorically than the other person, but rather on proofs stemming from the definitions and the rules and the axioms and so forth that are applied. On the other hand, corresponding to our passions or affections or emotions are what he calls dogmatics. And these are tied in with our human interests, like what is pleasure a good thing or a bad thing? What is the difference between virtue and vice? Is cleverness a virtue or a vice? All of those are points on which we can dispute about each other and we can't just sit down with a compass and protractor and resolve that sort of issue. In fact, it's totally unclear how we would resolve those kind of issues. We don't have axioms and definitions as we do in the mathematical cases. And so he points out there is controversy on all of these issues, on all other issues essentially outside of mathematics. And so much controversy that nobody really knows what's going on or what the basis of political authority and so forth is. So he says we need a new foundation of principles to avoid that kind of controversy. And so we actually need to model that discourse in the dogmatic realm that corresponds to our passions and interests on the kind of discourse we have corresponding to our reason. So we need definitions, axioms and so forth and we need some kind of solid foundation on which to discuss these things eliminate controversy and reach agreement about how we're gonna get along together. If we have such principles, we could work out what we should do in certain cases and what we shouldn't do. And then we would have a basis for enforcing laws about what people should and shouldn't do and not the appearance of arbitrary rules or restrictions. And so Hobbes' ambition is no less than to provide that foundation. And he says that with this foundation in hand, it will benefit commonwealth, that is governments and humankind in general. And so again, what he's doing is essentially providing a mathematical or almost Euclidean model for a science of human nature and our passions and interests. And all of that is laid out in the one page of the dedication, which you may have skipped thinking, oh, I just go on and read the actual substance of this, but the overall method is actually laid out there. Now in the beginning he says, here's how I plan to avoid controversy. I leave men, again that means humans in archaic English, but as they are in doubt and dispute, but intending not to take any principle upon trust, but only to put people in mind of what they know already or may know by their own experience, I hope to err less. So he will only proceed on those things about which there is no controversy or agreement, okay, or disagreement. So for example, if he can apply geometric axioms or definitions or proofs, then he will. So he could use a notion like that the interior angles of a triangle add up to the sum of two right angles because there's no controversy about that claim. He will use those kind of arguments and he will also use people's own experience. So what you can get people to reflect on in their own experience and agree is true of their own experience. And this is what makes him fundamentally an empiricist philosopher. As I defined last time, empiricism is the thesis that all knowledge comes about through experience and our channels of sensation and perception. And so he will not depend on anything like the authority of holy scripture or the credibility of famous ancient philosophers like Aristotle or points that people think are obvious but that only a few people disagree with or something. He won't use any of those. He'll only use things that supposedly you can get people to agree on immediately because it's either a matter of using their reason in a mathematical way or because by reflecting on their own experience, they will consent to what he says. So that's a heavy burden to take on but he does. Now he begins by giving a general division of human faculties. So he starts out by defining a human being using Aristotle's definition actually as a rational animal. So of course we're all animals. I hope you all realize that and aren't too disappointed if you didn't realize it but we are animals just like other animals, birds, fish, dogs and cats. We differ from these other animals in basically one respect only. I mean, there's a couple of respects. Yes, we are a two-footed animal. Yes, we're the only animal that laughs. Yes, we're the only animal that has opposable thumbs. We might be the only animals that have faces but what really distinguishes us from the rest of the animal kingdom is that we have reason that we're rational, that we're capable of using language. Not just voiced sounds but we can form an infinite number of grammatically correct sentences and judgments and that is just part of our powers. So if you define and accept the traditional definition of a human as a rational animal, and this is by the way enclosed in the name that we give our species, right? What do we call our species? Homo sapiens, anybody know what that means? What's that? Say species or something. No. Basically rational animal, okay? Sapiens means rational or wise, okay? Homo means man. It turns out there were other hominids. We killed them all off between 250,000 and 50,000 years ago and we've now designated ourselves as the wise or the rational humans. You might think that we're really putting on errors as a species to call ourselves that or are we really, do we really deserve to be called that? I mean lately you wouldn't think we're wise humans, right? But this is what differentiates us from other animals is this ability to use reason and language but corresponding to the fact that we're animals, we have all these bodily powers like nutrition, we can get energy from food and generation or reproduction, we can reproduce other members of our species, other humans and motive power, we can move ourselves around in space. Corresponding to the rational part, he says interestingly that the motive power also has a rational aspect because we don't just flail around spasmatically but we can actually control these motions by our reason. Other animals can control their motions in various ways like pursuing pleasure and avoiding pain and so forth but we can actually control them by rational decisions like making the rational decision to wake up this morning and come to class and so forth if that was a rational decision. You could, and I don't know why else you would be here, it's not like you were expecting so much pleasure or that there would be wonderful food and drink here or something, you reasoned that you want to go to class in order to pass and so forth and then that caused some kind of movement of your limbs that resulted in you being here. And the part that we're gonna spend most of the time on today is the cognitive imaginative or conceptive power. So cognition, which is what corresponds to this science, we call cognitive science and a lot of psychology is concerned with it, our imagination, our ability to form concepts. So that's the basic division of human faculties and Hobbes will have nothing else to say about our animal faculties. Those are all basically shared with other animals and are not relevant to his theory of human nature that is what makes humans distinct. For that he will focus on cognitive and rational motive powers. So the cognitive or conceptive faculty itself, he begins his account here by saying that there are in our minds continually certain images or conceptions of things without us. Without meaning outside of us. So we have images, you have images right now of things outside of you. Like Monty Johnson is outside of you right now and this computer and this podium and so forth appear to you to be outside of yourself. But you are having an internal image of them. These objects are not in your head. I am not physically in your eyes or in your brain. Something's happening in your brain which is an image or conception of a thing external to you. And you could annihilate or destroy the external objects and you would not necessarily destroy the imagination or the conception of the things. So if I walk out of here and get hit by a car and then cremated and I'm gone, you could still form an image of Monty Johnson or think about the concept of the professor for that philosophy class. Okay, so these images or conceptions in our mind persist even when the external objects are no longer there. And these imageries or representations of the qualities of these things that are external to us is what we call cognition, imagination, ideas, noticing, conception, knowledge, all of that is about these internal conceptions that we have. And the faculty of power or power by which we're capable of knowledge is just called the cognitive or the conceptive power that is the power to know and conceive of things. Okay, now what is radical here is the idea that all conceptions, all of these things inside our head proceed from actions of things external to us. They're somehow moving and acting on our sense channels, on our hearing, on our seeing, on our smelling, tasting, and so forth. Now, we don't have any idea and even in principle we have no access to what those actions or what those objects are actually like because all we have access to is the effects that they have on our minds and on our sense organs and what is actually internal to us. So all of these things that you perceive as being outside right now, none of them are outside. They are all internal to you. Okay, so this computer and this podium and Monty Johnson, those things as far as you know are just modifications of your mind that occurred through your sense organs. You don't have any direct access by your mind or senses or anything else to whatever objects and actions are out there external to you causing those effects on your sense organs. So we call it sense when the action is present, okay? And then the thing is called an object of sense. So I'm present right now and you're perceiving me as being present. That perception again is internal to your mind but as long as you have functioning organs say of vision, nobody in here is blind, right? So you can all see me and we call it sense when those conceptions are produced on the basis of some external object actually being present. Now of course, as I just said, it's possible to go back to these conceptions in memory or sense even when the objects are present but in that case we're not really sensing those things where we have some other mode of cognition thinking about them, remembering them, recollecting them, whatever. And each of the senses, vision, hearing, all of them have conceptions of various qualities, okay? So the quality relevant to vision is color, the quality relevant to hearing is sound, the quality relative to smell is odor, the quality relative to taste is flavor, et cetera. And that it is by means of those qualities that the objects are known. Now these qualities, sounds, colors, flavors, odors, feelings of hot and cold or rough and smooth, there's an illusion that makes us think that they're in the external objects, okay? That there's, if this is a brown podium, that there's brown in this object or that there's silver color in this object or that there's a silver color in this object. I have gray hair, so if there's actually gray in my hair, which I constantly deny and not just on these metaphysical grounds. But the truth of the matter is that they aren't, those qualities aren't in those objects. You have no idea what's in those objects. Those qualities are again just modifications of the conceptions that are in your own mind. So those qualities are qualities of what he calls the sentient subject, the person that's sensing. So you have warmth and softness or roughness and red and green and blue and loud and high pitched and so forth. These are all things in your mind. They aren't in the objects and they can be produced even without those objects in various ways, as he argues. So for example, you can produce a, if you stare at the sun and then the sun sets, you may still have an impression of the sun even though you're not sensing that object anymore. If you see a reflection of the moon in a pool, the moon isn't actually in the pool. Okay, so the object is not sitting there, but you have a conception of it still. Again, these external objects could all be annihilated and you could still have access to the conceptions that were formed when you did have sensations of them. So he says, section 10, whatever qualities our senses make us think there are in the world are not there but are seemings and apparitions only. The things that really are in the world without us are those motions by which these seemings are caused. And so this is the great deception of sense, which also is by sense to be corrected. As sense tells me when I see something directly, so this is how sense confuses us. I see something directly. I think the colors in that object. I think that blue is out there in this object, but since I could also see that in a reflection, like a mirror of the object, and there isn't blue actually in the mirror, but merely being reflected by the object, then I realize the color isn't really in the object. There's just some motions of things going on out there and it's having those motions and actions are affecting my sense organs in a certain way. Yeah, question. Could the object not be there as well using that argument as far as the reflection goes? If the color, it could be reason that the color is not there. Yes, so for example, a rainbow is a refractive. A rainbow or a halo that appears around the sun and the moon. There isn't actually any object there at all. There's just motion of light going through prisms, ice crystals or raindrops, and it's giving you the sensation that there's a rainbow there. Unlike actual physical arches that you could construct out of stone, the rainbow stays the same size relative wherever, even if you move closer to it, unlike an actual physical object. So for one thing, there are illusory objects out there. That is, there are actions that cause us to imagine that there are objects there that there aren't. And again, by sense, for example, by seeing that it doesn't change its size when we approach it or move farther away from it, then we correct that and say, okay, that isn't really an object, it's some kind of optical illusion. And this argument applies generally. It applies to all things. Everything is like a rainbow or an optical illusion in that sense, that there's some kinds of actions or motions going on in whatever this external world is, and it's having this effect on my mind and causing me to form these certain conceptions. Okay, and he summarizes this argument in these four propositions, that the subject wherein color and image are inherent is not the object or the thing seen, yeah. By applying this inquiry, he's not, is he trying to divide the very distance of physical objects outside of a perceiving subject, or is it meant to, the qualities perceived of objects are qualities that arise within the perceiving subject? Good question, and it's the latter. So first of all, he couldn't deny there are external objects because there are objects of sense, and there's a difference between sensing something and recollecting it, right? And there have to be objects outside of us that are the irritations that are irritating our sense organs in a way that make us form these. The origins. These conceptions, yes. And so this does not extend to what we call global skepticism or total world skepticism, right? Maybe there is no external world at all, and I'm just some kind of disembodied mind that all of these things are acting on. And the result of that kind of consideration is a philosophy we call solipsism, okay? Solipsism is the thesis that exactly one object exists in the entire universe, Monty Johnson, okay? And all of these things out here are just some kind of modifications of my mind. I have no reason to believe any of those are real any more than I should believe rainbows or halos around the moon are real. These are just something happening within my mind. How would I prove that there actually are things, external? All I can ever do is run into other conceptions caused by other sensations that I have. Now that's a very difficult argument to refute. In fact, it hasn't been refuted. There is no one that can prove that there actually is an external world or that anything exists external to you, okay? So, but Hobbes, it's important, does not go that far. He's radical, but he's not that radical. He's not a solipsist and he's not even a rationalist. He thinks there are external objects. It's just we can't say anything about them except the qualities that they produce in us. And so you put it rather precisely there that what he is denying is that these qualities, warmth, coldness, color, sounds that those exist out there, right? We think of sound as existing out there. It's like coming out of my stereo or something, but no, it's actually something happening in my mind through actions and vibrations that are occurring in the air. Those sounds aren't actually out there, okay? And neither are colors actually out there. There's just vibrating strings or waves or something like that and they're having some kind of effect on me. Now, were you raising your hand? Yeah. I was just gonna ask, why is it like, what is this argument that we should be aware that this is the case so that we can rely less heavily on our, or just so that we're aware that our senses aren't just as trustworthy as we think they are because we always, I mean, everything we do, we do because we think what we are experiencing is. Yes, so he's trying to limit the basis on which we can argue about things. We should not have an argument as if we're talking about how all those objects are actually constituted. All of our arguments are actually gonna have to bottom out in talking about what senses we have. Like we can agree that we perceive certain things that they have colors, they have sounds like that and in some cases we can agree that we're seeing the same thing or that perhaps we can all agree that this is brown or something like that. Okay, and that could serve as a basis for deciding whether we wanna buy more of them or furnish our apartment with them or something like that. But if it comes down to a metaphysical thesis about what the nature of these objects actually are, there is no argument that we can make outside of discussing and rearranging and juxtaposing these qualities which are the effects that those objects have on us. No one has direct access to those objects. So you might think that the result of this is a very skeptical view to oh, we don't really know what things are like, we only know how it's affecting our mind. There is a skeptical impact of that. But the way Hobbes puts it, there's also a reassuring thing that maybe we can infer something about these objects based on how they're affecting our sense organs because there really are objects out there that are actions. And so maybe we can theorize about, we can't see atoms, but maybe we can theorize, we can't see void, right? But maybe we can theorize that empty space must exist because we see objects moving and motion requires them or we can infer that atoms exist or infer that there must be molecules of a certain kind even if we can't see them based. But all of those arguments, whatever arguments we can make about black holes, nobody can see black holes, but we can infer that they exist in that dark energy. We know there has to be dark energy based, but what are the arguments for it? They are the things that we can see, okay? We see arms of the spiral galaxies rotating in certain ways and there's no way to explain that other than to pause it that there's some entity that we can't see. So it's not that we can't reason about these things at all, but there is a limit on how we must reason about them. We must reason about them on the basis of the qualities that affect us and there is nothing else to go on in his view.