René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes : A Dialogue

René Descartes and Thomas Hobbes: A Dialogue

As one embarks on the incredible journey through Descartes’ meditations,

a plethora of doubts, criticisms and seemingly fundamental problems arise and block

one’s progress. No doubt, many of these can be attributed to the fact that we of the

twenty-first century come more than three and a half centuries after the brilliant mind of

Descartes (or shall we say, ‘that was Descartes’) spawned the immense framework of

philosophy that is contained within The Meditations. Consequently, we are biased by

more recent modes of thought that cannot address Cartesian issues at quite the same

level, as would an approach more contemporary to Descartes. It is for this reason that

criticisms or objections by Descartes’ contemporaries provides us with a much needed

alternative perspective, while at the same time preserving the historical context that is of

prime necessity in discussing matters such as this. In particular, the objections of the

well-known English philosopher, Empiricist and materialist, Thomas Hobbes, serve to

challenge, and with considerable depth at that, the Rationalism of Descartes.

Furthermore, Descartes’ Third Meditation seems by far the most problematic with respect

to unspoken assumptions, logical structure and even ambiguities of definition.

Consequently, this paper will attempt to discuss some of Hobbes’ objections to certain

logical propositions contained within Descartes’ Proof of the existence of God.

In Meditation III, Descartes introduces the concepts of formal reality (i.e.

the reality attesting to the nature or existence of an object or entity) and objective reality

(i.e. the formal reality possessed by the object or entity that is represented by an ...

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...se from an imperfect realization of the significance

of infinity in his time. A better understanding was achieved only in the late 1800s, when

the Russian-German mathematician Georg Cantor developed the first mathematically

rigorous theory of infinite numbers.3

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1 Roger Ariew & Eric Watkins. Modern Philosophy: An anthology of primary sources. Indianapolis/Cambridge, 1998.

2 This definition (as quoted from p.59 of 1) includes:

“[A substance]...is a thing in which whatever we perceive or whatever is objectively in one of our ideas exists

either formally or eminently.”

3 Sir Roger Penrose. The Emperor’s New Mind. New York, 1990. (p.108-112 of this excellent amalgam of science and

philosophy, deal with the subtleties of infinite numbers and the fact that exist not just one, but at least two and potentially an

infinite number (!) of different infinities).