De CorporeThomas Hobbes
About De Corpore
(1655) is the first part of Hobbes's systematic trilogy on body, man, and citizen. It lays the materialist foundations for everything that follows. Philosophy, Hobbes declares, is the knowledge of effects from their causes and causes from their effects, and its subject matter is body in motion.
The work opens with an account of language, reasoning, and method. Hobbes defines reasoning as computation: the adding and subtracting of names. He then constructs the concepts of space, time, body, and accident from first principles. Space is the phantasm of a thing existing without the mind; time is the phantasm of motion. Body is whatever occupies space and subsists independently of thought.
The treatment of causation is rigorously mechanistic. Every event has a sufficient cause, and every cause is a motion of body. There is no action at a distance, no incorporeal substance, no final cause in nature. The physics anticipates the political argument of : if all reality is matter in motion, then human passions, reasoning, and social order must be explicable on the same terms.