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"Hobbes’s Latin prose autobiography indicates that he spent five years studying Aristotelian logic and physics at Magdalen Hall in Oxford. In his Brief Lives, John Aubrey writes about this period: “He did not much care for logick, yet he learnd it, and thought himselfe a good disputant.” Hobbes adds in his autobiography that a few years later, during a tour of France and Italy, he realized that the philosophy and logic in which, to his judgment, he had made fine progress were “treated with derision by wise people” ; for this reason, he threw away this “vain logic and philosophy.”
Hobbes’s autobiography does not mention that he was engaged as amanuensis to Francis Bacon, presumably by the end of the 1610s. Bacon complained that the untimely teaching of logic in colleges was responsible for a corruption of what should be the “art of arts”: Far from providing a method of invention of scientific axioms, useful for any (p. 22) judgment, logic degenerated at the university into something superficial and sterile, thus making it an object of derision.
Bacon and Hobbes focus their critique on the confinement of the study of logic at the university to a set of formal schemata for the fabric of valid arguments. Even though, in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries booklets on sophismata, insolubilia, and obligationes were no longer the most ordinary textbooks for the acquisition of logical skills, logic taught at the university was denounced both by Bacon and Hobbes as a merely abstract logic, a vain logic heiress to scholastic logic.
The background at Oxford by the end of the Tudor period is indeed that of an official restoration of Aristotelian logic in as strong a position as its medieval one. Decrees promulgated in 1586 prescribe that Aristotle and the authors faithful to Aristotle are to be defended. Yet, thanks to Charles Schmitt’s research on late sixteenth- and early seventeenth-century Aristotelianism in England, two key points have been clarified: (1) Aristotle’s revival indicates that the scholastic Aristotelian legacy had been formerly weakened, and (2) Aristotle’s revival is not to be viewed as retrograde, but as a reassertion of Aristotelianism on new grounds. E. J. Ashworth has noted that “syllogistic represented the main focus of logic” in this “renewed Aristotelian tradition,” but this does not mean that the dominance of Aristotelianism can be identified with the dominance of scholasticism. The truth was that a bifurcation in the Aristotelian tradition in logic had been introduced by the humanist charge against the barbaric technicalities of analytical discourse and the abuse of formal reasoning in medieval sophisticated and artificialized Aristotelian logic. Humanists like Rudolph Agricola had developed an antischolastic Aristotelianism insisting on the tradition of the Topics. Now, although this humanist tradition does not receive recognition in (p. 23) the new statutes of the university, booklists and student notebooks in early modern Oxford colleges reveal a practice of logic teaching different from the official restrictive recommendations. James McConica and Mordechai Feingold have shown that tutors usually omitted the late medieval accretions to Aristotelian dialectic. Preference was given to the humanist reform of Aristotle’s dialectic. Aristotelianism was officially reasserted in resistance to the diffusion of Ramism, without this anti-Ramism entailing that the university “clung to sterile Aristotelian logic.” The target was rather, in the context of increasing interest in logical method, the function of dialectic for the organization of knowledge. Ramus’s logical reform, by contrast with Agricola’s, had gone far beyond criticizing scholastic logic. In the complex matrix studied by Walter Ong, in which Peter Ramus’s new dialectic was formed, the Agricolan tradition was coupled with a critique of Aristotle’s dialectic as failing to preserve the requirements of the natural logic of human reasoning. In this context, the Oxford 1586 decrees were not a return to scholastic Aristotelianism, but an opposition to Ramist refurbishing of dialectic. Eclecticism, not monolithic scholastic Aristotelianism, was the real background of Hobbes’s personal formation in logic.
In his history of the humanities in seventeenth-century Oxford, Feingold writes that, like Bacon, Hobbes was “prone to malign the verbalism and emptiness of Aristotelian and scholastic logic.” When Feingold emphasizes Hobbes’s deriding of specialized logic, his point is that there is discrepancy between that about which “the heralds of the new philosophy” complained—namely, that the sterile Aristotelian logic at the university was moribund—and the true status of logic in early-modern Oxford curriculum. Now, it seems to me that in Hobbes’s censure of scholasticism, the case of logic is not reducible to the maligning to which Feingold points.
Hobbes’s famous charge against the universities is that they had become completely vassal to “the Authority of Aristotle,” so that the philosophy taught there “is not properly Philosophy, (the nature whereof dependeth not on Authors), but Aristotelity.” In chapter 46 of Leviathan, Hobbes denounces the “insignificant Traines of strange and barbarous words, or words otherwise used, then in the common use of the Latine tongue,” of which “Vain Philosophy” makes use. And he critiques the theological perversion of religion when the interpretation of Holy Scriptures is left to Aristotelian metaphysics. Yet Hobbes’s dark history of philosophy as breeding the monster of scholastic theology does not accuse scholastic logic of being “insignificant speech.”This logic plays no role in the “particular Tenets of Vain Philosophy, derived to the Universities, and thence into the Church, partly from Aristotle, partly from Blindnesse of understanding.” Meaningless words such as “Entity, Intentionality, Quiddity, and other insignificant words of the School” are contrasted in chapter 4 of Leviathan with words used about words and speech: the words “Generall, Speciall, Affirmative, Negative, Interrogative, Optative, Infinitive.” The latter words are not parasitic, but necessary for distinguishing modes of speaking: They belong to a meta-language whose formation is inseparable from human language itself. Words of this natural meta-language are said to be as “usefull” as words for “Figures, Numbers, Measures, Colours, Sounds, Fancies, Relations” whose invention already goes beyond the Adamic model of the use of words (p. 25) just for naming things offered to sense perception. The “names of Words and Speech” are only those which are necessarily generated by the use of language. They are needed even by ordinary language as an ultimate kind of words, distinguished from three previous sets of names (for things, for the properties of things, and for their conceptions). Interestingly, abstract words dealing in medieval logic with the distinct properties of terms (e.g., categoremata/syncategoremata) are not contrasted by Hobbes with legitimate names for names. Later, although “Aristotelity” is blamed for the absurdities of Aristotle’s whole “naturall Philosophy” (“Metaphysiques” and “Physiques”) and for those of his “Morall, and Civill Philosophy” (“Ethiques” and “Politiques”), the Organon is not mentioned: “the frivolous Distinctions, barbarous Terms, and obscure language of the Schoolmen, taught in the Universities” are condemned only with respect to “the Metaphysiques, Ethiques, and Politiques of Aristotle. 2Cees Leijenhorst has provided an insightful study of Hobbes’s depreciation of scholastic metaphysics and theology as “vain philosophy,” but he does not differentiate Hobbes’s critique of scholastic “nonsensical jargon” from the traditional humanist critique of “barbarous” terms in medieval formal logic. It seems to me that, for Hobbes, the case of first philosophy and the case of logic (“dialectic” in the humanist critique) should be distinguished.
The only logic that Hobbes denounces in Part IV of 1651 Leviathan is the one vaguely attributed to “the Schoole of the Graecians”: “Their Logique which should be the Method of Reasoning, is nothing else but Captions of words, and Inventions how to puzzle such as should goe about to pose them.” Hobbes is probably thinking of the pseudologic of “Sophists and Sceptics,” which is criticized later for their clever paradoxes, which (p. 26) the De corpore features as intending deception but mostly begetting self-deception. A good example is Zeno’s “sophistical argument” against motion, which, according to Hobbes, violates syllogistic truth-conditions and constitutes therefore a mere paralogism. Hobbes argues that “Sophistical captions are more often faulty in the matter than in the form of the syllogism.”
The 1668 Latin Leviathan, however, makes room for a specific critique against the Peripatetic school. Hobbes denounces the radical uselessness of the “sect” of Aristotelians with respect to the end of philosophy, the knowledge of the causes of natural phenomena, because it has offered nothing “apart from the subtleties of dialectic and rhetoric.” Also, “some” scholastic followers of Aristotle’s philosophy are described as having “ambitiously showed off their Aristotelianism” in their “logical and physical treatises.” Yet, Hobbes’s main objection is that “the majority of them” adopted “Aristotle’s doctrine of ‘separated forms.’ ” Although Aristotle’s mistaking of the merely connective function of the copula for the denotation of some underlying self-subsisting thing is denounced as the source from which the doctrine of separate essences was derived, the fault is not in Aristotle’s logic, which is not denounced itself for contributing to this nonsensical doctrine. What is clear about Aristotle’s metaphysics—Hobbes constantly alleges that Aristotle, by his identification ousia/on, has defended the separate existence of abstract essences—is not so clear about his logic. The expressions “Abstract Essences” and “Substantiall Formes” are for Hobbes representative of the “jargon” of metaphysics, but he does not give any example of jargon taken from Aristotelian logic. When the Appendix ad Leviathan criticizes the theologians explaining the dogma of Trinity for having made use of “definitions borrowed from Aristotle’s logic and metaphysics” instead of grounding their demonstrations only in the Holy Scripture, Hobbes does not blame directly technical words, “verba artis,” (p. 27) but their misuse or misapplication in theological explications. The main charge is not against Aristotelian logic itself, but against its theological abuse when combined with Aristotle’s metaphysical doctrine."
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-Martine Pécharman, "Hobbes on Logic, or How to Deal with Aristotle’s Legacy", chapter 1 in A.P. Martinich & Kinch Hoekstra (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Hobbes, Oxford University Press, 2016.
