Document Type
Article
Publication Date
3-24-2014
DOI
10.1080/09608788.2014.893226
Abstract
Many critics, Descartes himself included, have seen Hobbes as uncharitable or even incoherent in his Objections to the Meditations on First Philosophy. I argue that when understood within the wider context of his views of the late 1630s and early 1640s, Hobbes's Objections are coherent and reflect his goal of providing an epistemology consistent with a mechanical philosophy. I demonstrate the importance of this epistemology for understanding his Fourth Objection concerning the nature of the wax and contend that Hobbes's brief claims in that Objection are best understood as a summary of the mechanism for scientific knowledge found in his broader work. Far from displaying his confusion, Hobbes's Fourth Objection in fact pinpoints a key weakness of Descartes's faculty psychology: its unintelligibility within a mechanical philosophy.
Recommended Citation
Adams, Marcus P., "The Wax and the Mechanical Mind: Reexamining Hobbes’s Objections to Descartes’s Meditations" (2014). Philosophy Faculty Scholarship. 20.
https://scholarsarchive.library.albany.edu/cas_philosophy_scholar/20
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This work is made available under the Scholars Archive Terms of Use.
Comments
Publisher Acknowledgment
This is an Author's Original Manuscript of an article whose final and definitive form, the Version of Record, has been published in the British Journal for the History of Philosophy online on 24 Mar 2014, copyright Taylor & Francis, available online at: http://www.tandfonline.com/10.1080/09608788.2014.893226
Marcus P. Adams (2016). Hobbes on Natural Philosophy as "True Physics" and Mixed Mathematics. Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 56:43-51.