This grant provides support for the preparation of three volumes of mathematical works to be published by Oxford University Press as part of the Clarendon Edition of the Works of Thomas Hobbes. The principal investigator has signed a contract to edit these volumes, and the award is being used to carry out the three tasks necessary for preparation of a new edition: assembling the text from the originals (both printed and manuscript), translating the non-English materials, and redaction (including notation of variants, writing of introductions, and preparation of explanatory notes).
Hobbes is a figure of central importance in the development of early modern science, and his prominence as a political theorist has placed him at the center of numerous studies of the social, cultural, and intellectual context of seventeenth-century science. Hobbes's significance for the development of mathematics is also profound, although scholars have tended to overlook his mathematical work. This relative neglect stems, in part, from the mistaken impression that his mathematical writings are nothing more than misguided attempts to solve such unsolvable problems as the squaring of the circle. Although Hobbes was convinced that his first principles would enable the solution of such problems, the majority of his mathematical writings concern methodological and philosophical issues that are independent of his failed circle quadratures, and many other of his writings are part of his long and bitter controversy with John Wallis and other members of the Royal Society. A proper edition of his mathematical works is thus of great interest to STS scholarship generally, and particularly to studies of science and mathematics in the seventeenth century.
A major obstacle impeding scholarly attention to Hobbes's mathematics is the fact that the current standard edition of his collected works has a completely inadequate presentation of the mathematical material. This fact makes this older edition almost useless for scholarly investigation of Hobbes's mathematics. By including complete texts, adequate diagrams, introductions, translations, notes, and a critical apparatus, the mathematical volumes of the Clarendon Works will make accessible a wealth of material relevant to studies of the philosophical, social, and cultural background of seventeenth-century mathematics.
