The PI will write the three core chapters forming the heart of a monograph on the natural philosophy of Thomas Hobbes, tracing its gradual, piecemeal exposition through surviving manuscript letters and treatises from the later 1630s to its first full printed exposition in Elementorum philosophiae sectio prima de corpore (1655). This monograph will draw on the edition of these materials the PI is currently completing, for The Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. It will offer the first account of Hobbes's natural philosophy to be based on an accurate understanding of the canon and character of the pertinent texts. Intellectual merit The monograph will offer a fresh account of Hobbes's natural philosophical thinking, from inception up through its first full articulation and subsequent revision, based upon new textual foundations and shaped by recent approaches to the history of ideas. The PI will build upon the foundation of his edition (which offers a revised canon, chronology, and text of the relevant writings) an account of the development of Hobbes's natural philosophy that exploits archival evidence (unpublished manuscripts and early printed books), employs the techniques of paleographic, bibliographic, and rhetorical analysis in examining it, and draws on modern scholarship in the history of philosophy and science to offer an account of Hobbes's scientific thinking that is alert both to the contexts in which it was developed and to the circumstances in which it was articulated. The PI will compare the different articulations of Hobbes's natural philosophy, peering beneath the powerful rhetoric of coherence and consistency to distinguish the phases of its development-from letters and fragments of the late 1630s to the shifts in Hobbes's conception of his manuscript De corpore. The PI will situate this analysis in a broad intellectual and social context by examining the impact of education, patronage, politics, and personality on the development of Hobbes's thinking.The monograph will correct supplement, and perhaps even supersede, the still standard work on the subject, Frithiof Brandt's Thomas Hobbes' Mechanical Conception of Nature (1928). Broader impacts By offering a clear, accessible overview of the development and significance of Hobbes's natural philosophy, the monograph will serve those students of Hobbes's political philosophy who have found it difficult to engage with his science due to the paucity of English-language scholarship on the subject. For historians of science it will provide an accurate and up-to-date account of the development of Hobbes's thinking in relation to that of his contemporary friends (Gassendi, Mersenne, Digby) and rivals (Descartes) among mechanist philosophers. Finally, in its account of the philosopher as client in a noble household it will be of interest those concerned more broadly with the intellectual and social history of early modern Europe.
