The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes

The most convenient, accessible guide to Hobbes available.

Tom Sorell (Edited by)

9780521422444, Cambridge University Press

Paperback, published 26 January 1996

420 pages, 10 b/w illus.
22.8 x 14.9 x 2.6 cm, 0.61 kg

'… a substantial reference work for quite advanced students, providing articles on all the widely varied aspects of the work of seventeenth-century England's most outstanding philosopher prior to Locke.' Robert Burns, The Expository Times

It was as a political thinker that Thomas Hobbes first came to prominence, and it is as a political theorist that he is most studied today. Yet the range of his writings extends well beyond morals and politics. Hobbes had distinctive views in metaphysics and epistemology, and wrote about such subjects as history, law, and religion. He also produced full-scale treatises in physics, optics, and geometry. All of these areas are covered in this Companion, most in considerable detail. The volume also reflects the multidisciplinary nature of current Hobbes scholarship by drawing together perspectives that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of science and mathematics, intellectual historians, political scientists, and literary theorists.

1. A summary biography of Hobbes Noel Malcolm
2. Hobbes's scheme of the sciences Tom Sorell
3. First philosophy and the foundations of knowledge Yves Charles Zarka
4. Hobbes and the method of natural science Douglas Jesseph
5. Hobbes and mathematics Hardy Grant
6. Hobbes on light and vision Jan Prins
7. Hobbes's psychology Bernard Gert
8. Hobbes's moral philosophy Richard Tuck
9. Hobbes's political philosophy Alan Ryan
10. Lofty science and local politics Johann Sommerville
11. Hobbes on law M. M. Goldsmith
12. History in Hobbes's thought Luc Borot
13. Hobbes on rhetoric Victoria Silver
14. Hobbes on religion Patricia Springborg.

Subject Areas: Western philosophy: c 1600 to c 1900 [HPCD]