Daniel Garber: Hobbes against the Aristotelity of the Schools in the Leviathan

Lecture by Daniel Garber (Princeton), organized by the Department of the History of Philosophy

In his Leviathan (1651), Thomas Hobbes set himself against the dominant scholastic Aristotelianism then current in the Universities. Indeed, he claimed that philosophy as it was taught in the universities wasn’t even really philosophy, properly speaking. In a memorable passage, he wrote: “And since the authority of Aristotle is only current there [i.e., in the Schools], that study is not properly philosophy (the nature whereof dependeth not on authors) but Aristotelity.” In this paper, (continue reading...)