Hobbes and Sarpi: Method, matter, and natural philosophy

This paper takes as its starting pointHobbes’s first European grand tour, which the future philosopher and his pupil William Cavendish II made together during 1614-15. On this tour, while in Venice they met Fulgenzio Micanzio, and probably also the famous Servite friar Paolo Sarpi, ‘consultore in iure’ of the Venetian Republic. Hobbes scholars point to the similarities between some political and theological-political doctrines of Sarpi and Hobbes, but this paper focuses on the two writers’ natural philosophy, showing the analogies linking them. Firstly, the two thinkers have the same conception of the different epistemological status that separates mathematics (conventional and aprioristic) from the physical sciences (in which knowledge acquired can only be hypothetical and conjectural). However, the correlations also involve the genesis of human knowledge: in both authors we find the same model, which starts from the action of an external object on the senses of perception, to reach the “universals” which are none other than names: all objects that occupy space in the natural world are bodies, and the entire physical world must be interpreted solely in materialistic terms of matter and local motion. Finally, the two thinkers make the same effort, although to different extents, to adapt the Aristotelian vocabulary to the exigencies of a new natural philosophy, which contemplates the world as simply a mechanical system; thus they leave behind them the Aristotelian physics, founded on qualities and other concepts of the Aristotelian tradition.