Title: "Hobbes's War against Boyle and Wallis"
Emilio Sergio
Abstract:
I intend to summarize a reappraisal of Hobbes-Wallis controversy involving, in the years 1660 to 1665, such authors as Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke. I will start from a perspective until now less explored, that is to say, Hobbes’s struggle to affirm the certainty of his Elements of Philosophy (1642, 1655, and 1658) in the early Restoration period. Soon after the publication of the Leviathan (1651), Hobbes fought a compact group of Oxford professors – Seth Ward, John Wallis, and John Wilkins –, whom aimed to tear down Hobbes’s philosophy and politics carrying different skills and competences: logic, mathematics, theology, ethics, and natural philosophy. After the so-called “Storm” (1654-1658)[1], something changed in Hobbes’s strategy. On the end of January 1660, Boyle and Hooke published the New Experiments physico-mechanicall touching the spring of the air and its effects[2]. By the August of the next year, Hobbes released the Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aëris, containing his critiques to the New Experiments, plus a short appendix on the (failed) attempt to solve and to demonstrate the mathematical problem De duplicatione cubi. In fact, as Jon Parkin (2007, pp. 215-222) pointed out, Hobbes’s Dialogus physicus contributed for the most part to reinforce the harshness of the “anti-Hobbesian reaction” Ward, Wallis, and Wilkins boosted during the “Storm”. At same time, the Dialogus is a good example of the complex strategy Hobbes started to play soon after the early Restoration period. As well as Hobbes, both Boyle and Hooke were two “unorthodox” Baconians: they were among the most eminent scientific virtuosi of Restoration period, and, in the early 1660s, they became two of the strongest fellows of the early Royal Society. After 1660, what changed in Hobbes’s intellectual ‘battlefield’ was the kind of role game he played versus Boyle and the Royal Society. Following the several episodes of the quarrel leading the aforementioned period, I find that, basically, Oxford scientists would not appreciate and fully understand (not officially, at least) the reasons and motives of Hobbes’s approach to the «first grounds» of his natural philosophy. Catching a wide range of historical and philosophical issues, on both sides of the skirmish there was the creation of a new language for the mechanical philosophy. A key feature focuses on language, logic, grammar, and etymology, which may help to unfold some misunderstandings of Hobbes’s philosophy and his politics of science.
[1]: Jon Parkin, Taming the Leviathan. The Reception of the Political and Religious Ideas of Thomas Hobbes in England 1640-1700, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2007.
[2]: Oxford, 1660; 2nd ed. New Experiments physico-mechanical: touching the air [...] Whereunto is added a Defence of the authors explication of the experiments, against the objections of Franciscus Linus, and Thomas Hobbes [An Examen of Mr. T. Hobbes his Dialogus Physicus de Natura Aëris], Oxford, 1662.