The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes (Cambridge Companions to Philosophy)

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 on Hobbes that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of science and mathematics, intellectual historians, political scientists, and literary theorists.

It is for Leviathan, his controversial work of political philosophy, that Thomas Hobbes is best known, but his interests extended beyond morals and politics to metaphysics and epistemology, physics and geometry, history and law, and biblical interpretation. (Also, he wrote his autobiography at the age of 84--in Latin verse!) Thus the aim of The Cambridge Companion to Hobbes is "to offer a much broader view of Hobbes's intellectual preoccupations than is usually available," and "to bring together the different perspectives on Hobbes that are now being developed in parallel by philosophers, historians of mathematics and science, historians of early modern England, political scientists, and writers of literary studies." It succeeds admirably, rising to a challenge set by the man himself: "It must be extremely hard to find out the opinions and meanings of those men that are gone from us long ago, and have left us no other signification thereof but their books."

The Companion follows the order of Hobbes's own system, working from physics to psychology to politics. His views on psychology, moral philosophy, and political philosophy--traditionally considered the crucial topics of his system--are expertly handled by Bernard Gert, Richard Tuck, and Alan Ryan. Perhaps more gratifying are the essays on less familiar topics: Yves Charles Zarka reveals Hobbes's unexpected commitment to what superficially looks like Aristotelian metaphysics, while Hardy Grant discusses his career in mathematics, a diversion marred by an embarrassing claim to have squared the circle. --Glenn Branch