ABSTRACT
The author uses the metaphor of location to broach how Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) conceives of the metaphysical constitution of the mind. Hobbes’s view of the mind and its operations clearly owes a great deal to his materialism and mechanism. The term ‘mind’ appears remarkably often throughout Hobbes’s works. At the same time, it is left unexplained where one might most expect an account. Hobbes’s later works make clear both the central place of the imagination and its multifarious dependence on sense. The role of phantasms as the basic material for the mental acts may help explain a somewhat odd thought experiment that surfaces several times in Hobbes’s works. To Hobbes’s thinking, reckoning is a process of mental ‘addition’ and ‘subtraction,’ albeit one that extends beyond strict magnitudes and that may make use of a wide variety of systems of marks and signs.
