The Mechanisation of Aristotelianism: The Late Aristotelian Setting of Thomas Hobbes' Natural Philosophy
by: Cees Leijenhorst

Hardcover. Leiden/Boston, Brill, 1st, 2002, Hardcover, pictorial cloth, 242 pages. An acclaimed study - now available for the first time in English - investigates the relation between Thomas Hobbes? natural philosophy as represented in his Prima Philosophia (the second part of De Corpore (1655)) and the various currents of Renaissance and early modern Aristotelianism. Although Hobbes presents his mechanistic philosophy of nature as an outright replacement of Aristotelian physics, he continued to use the vocabulary and arguments of sixteenth and seventeenth-century Aristotelianism. Leijenhorst shows that while in some cases this common vocabulary hides profound conceptual innovations, in other cases Hobbes' self-proclaimed "new" philosophy is simply old wine in new sacks. Leijenhorst's book substantially enriches our insight in the complexity of the rise of modern philosophy and the way it struggled with the Aristotelian heritage. Clean copy.