HOBBES

ON THE HUMAN BEING

FOOTNOTES
  1. This is a Hobbesian pun. He is both saying that he will give an account or explanation of these things, and alluding to his own theory of reasoning, according to which logical deduction is analogous to drawing up accounts in the financial sense.

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  2. This is one of the rare occasions when Hobbes uses the word vox to mean specifically a spoken word.

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  3. Latin: Cognitio.

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  4. An ‘apriori’ proof is one in which effects are deduced from causes (this is not the Kantian sense). In general we can know only the possible causes of known effects; but we can know the actual cause if it is our own voluntary action.

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  5. Latin: Passio, or ‘passion’. Presumably Hobbes is thinking of what can subsequently be done to a shape after it has been created (e.g. bending it, or rotating it).

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  6. From the Greek mathema, meaning ‘lesson’.

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  7. Although I have used plural verbs throughout, Hobbes oddly moves from the singular agreeing with ‘someone’ in the first sentence, to the plural in the second. Grammatically, the subject of ‘feel’ and ‘make’ should be ‘advantages and disadvantages’, which doesn’t make sense.

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  8. Literally, it ‘follows from the syntychia of things’, where syntychia is the Greek for a chance coincidence.

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  9. Latin has the same word doctus for ‘learned’, or ‘taught’, or ‘educated’.

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  10. Gaius Cassius Longinus and Marcus Junius Brutus murdered Gaius Julius Caesar in 44 BC. François Ravaillac assassinated Henri IV of France in 1610, and Jacques Clément was a Dominican friar, who assassinated Henri III of France in 1589.

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  11. This is a misquotation from Terence, Phormio 454, who says ‘people’, not ‘heads’. Interestingly, Terence also goes on to say that each has their own moral code.

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