HOBBES

OBJECTIONS TO DESCARTES’ MEDITATIONS

FOOTNOTES
  1. The Latin res cogitans is deeply ambiguous. Descartes preferred the ordinary-language ‘thing’ to the technical ‘substance’, and he treated ‘thinking thing’ and ‘thinking substance’ as equivalent. In English, there is a vast difference between ‘I am a thinking substance,’ and ‘I am thinking substance,’ just as there is between ‘a body is an extended substance,’ and ‘body [as a whole] is extended substance.’ This ambiguity is more difficult to bring out using the word ‘thing’, since ‘I am thinking thing’ is not grammatical English. Out of deference to Descartes’ text, I avoid translating ‘thing’ as ‘substance’, even though it obscures this important ambiguity.

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  2. The Latin is animus, which means ‘mind’ rather than ‘soul’. But English lacks a synonym for ‘mind’.

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  3. The Latin res intelligens is ambiguous. It can mean either ‘an intelligent thing,’ or ‘a thing which is in the process of understanding.’ Here Hobbes seems to be moving between the two senses.

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  4. Throughout the Objections, the word actus is used in a wider sense than there is a word for in English. I translate it variously as ‘act’, ‘action’, ‘characteristic’, or ‘state’, as the context demands.

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  5. I sometimes translate ‘subject’ as ‘underlying subject,’ when it is important that its root meaning is ‘that which underlies.’

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  6. Descartes uses the expression ratio formalis, which is in effect the ‘formal cause’ or ‘essence’.

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  7. Literally, ‘cogitative’, or relating to thought.

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  8. The word is conscientia, and it is slightly anachronistic to translate it as ‘consciousness’. It is either ‘conscience’, or a state of being aware (which, for most thinkers, would apply also to animals).

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  9. Literally ‘they conceive completely different words.’

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  10. The Latin vox can mean ‘word’ (silent or uttered), ‘speech’, or ‘language’. I think it is clear that the argument here is about whether there can be non-linguistic thought, not about whether there can be unspoken thought.

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  11. A&T omit the word non, which is present in the text of the meditations (A&T, p.51, l.8).

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  12. That is, the motions of the spirits in the nerves which are responsible for sensation and bodily motion; and these motions are common to humans and animals. The word ‘animal’ comes from anima, the word used for ‘soul’ here.

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