On Body is the first Section of Hobbes’s Latin trilogy, The Elements of Philosophy, even though it wasn’t published until 1655, 13 years after Section 3, On the Citizen. He had already drafted quite a lot of it before writing Leviathan, and there are close parallels between the earlier parts of the two works. In general, the treatment of common topics is more detailed in On Body; but there are some exceptions.

The title On Body (De Corpore) is ambiguous, since Hobbes in effect equated ‘body’ and ‘substance’. Taken in the former sense, it means a treatise on the nature of the material world, or physics (in its broad, 17th-century sense). Taken in the latter sense, it means a treatise on being in general, or metaphysics. This ambiguity corresponds to the ambiguity of the word ‘philosophy’, which could mean either ‘metaphysics’ or ‘natural philosophy.’ In fact, the work covers both, and has an overall structure which is similar to (and perhaps modelled on) Descartes’ Principles of Philosophy.

PART 1: CALCULATION, OR LOGIC covers language, reasoning, the nature of knowledge, and scientific method. I have included virtually the whole of Part I.

PART II: FIRST PHILOSOPHY covers space, time, causality, and substance, but then moves into a discussion of quantity, which is not so much ‘first philosophy’, as a quite technical text on geometry and ratios. I have included virtually the whole of Part II, until it starts becoming technical.

PART III: THE RATIOS OF MOTIONS AND MAGNITUDES continues the discussion of geometry and ratios, but also makes some general statements about the laws of mechanics. I have included some extracts on Hobbes’s theory of conation, and on the use of the analytic method in geometry.

PART IV: PHYSICS, OR THE PHENOMENA OF NATURE. This consists mostly of speculative accounts of various natural phenomena. However, it begins with an account of animal (and human) sensation and motivation, which I have included. I have also included some extracts on the infinitely large and the infinitely small; on the vacuum; on light and heat; and Hobbes’s concluding remarks.

I have used the Molesworth edition (LW I) for my translation, and page numbers in square brackets refer to it.

An anonymous translation into English was published in 1656 (reprinted in Molesworth, EW I). The translation is generally very competent; but a number of changes or additions were made at Hobbes’s request. As the translator says in his preface (and this is confirmed by Hobbes himself elsewhere):

‘When I had finished my translation of this first section of the Elements of Philosophy, it might have come into your hands sooner than it now does, if I had committed it to print immediately. But since I was very unconfident of may own ability to do the job well, I thought that, before publishing it, I should ask Mr. Hobbes to look at it, and to make any corrections or other changes he thought fit. The result is that you can rest assured that, as I now present it to you, it does not vary at all from the author’s own sense and meaning; although you will find that some passages have been expanded, some have been altered, and two chapters (18 and 20) almost completely changed.’

However, we do not know how carefully Hobbes checked the bulk of the work, which remained unchanged; nor do we know whether the changes incorporated Hobbes’s own wording (I think they probably did); nor whether he wrote them in English or in Latin.

As far as I am aware, mine is the first translation of On Body into modern English, with one exception. This is a translation of the first six chapters by Aloysius Martinich, published by Abaris Books (New York, 1981). The translation is prefaced with a lengthy essay by Isabel Hungerland and George Vick, claiming that Hobbes anticipated Grice’s theory of speech acts. Not only is this claim absurd, but it makes even worse a translation which is bad enough already.

Go to Index of On Body