Stephen Clucas, de Birkbeck College (Université de Londres), présentera sa communication “Early philosophical critiques of Thomas Hobbes’s De corpore: Ward and Moranus.” le jeudi 11 mai 2017, de 17h30 à 19h30. Maison de la Recherche, 28 rue Serpente, 75006, salle D421.

La séance sera suivie d’un pot amical de fin d’année dans le hall du 3ème étage (Serpente), de 19h à 20h.

Résumé :
“In 1656, both Seth Ward (Savilian Professor of Astronomy at Oxford) and the Flemish philosopher Moranus published attacks on the natural philosophy of Thomas Hobbes. Ward’s In Thomae Hobbii Philosophiam Exercitatio Epistolica (Oxford, 1656) and Moranus’s Animadversiones in Elementorum Philosophiae (Brussels, 1655) attack Hobbes on a number of fronts. In this paper I will be focusing specifically on their very different critiques of Hobbes’s experiments in book XXVI of De corpore concerning the vacuum (or the lack thereof). While Ward attacks Hobbes primarily in terms of logical and hydraulic arguments, Moranus focuses instead on refuting Hobbes’s matter theory, using late scholastic ideas about the behaviour of minima naturalia in fluid substances. Ward accuses Hobbes of using a “vacuous argument to expel the vacuum from the world”, and believed that since Hobbes made the absence of vacuum the “sole foundation” of his natural philosophy “once it has been overturned the whole thing will collapse”. Whilst Hobbes’ later arguments about pneumatic experiments are (thanks to Shapin and Schaffer) well known, these two early critiques give us two very different philosophical perspectives on Hobbes’s theories.”

Discutante: Myriam-Isabelle Ducrocq (Université Paris Nanterre)

Contact: Sandrine Parageau (sparageau@u-paris10.fr)