ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes's references to Aristotle are sometimes harshly critical. In Leviathan, and in his trilogy, The Elements of Philosophy, he goes far beyond registering differences with Aristotle, far beyond expressing measured dissent. To begin with, there is Hobbes's nominalism in science and his claim that Aristotle's philosophy 'has credit with those who reason with names of things', rather than with conceptions of them. Aristotle is a presence in the moral and political philosophy, since much of Hobbes's positive doctrine flows from the denial of a central and unmistakably Aristotelian thesis, namely, that man is by nature political. In rhetoric Hobbes departs very markedly from Aristotle, but to knowledge never advertises the fact. On the contrary, Hobbes was both in public and private an admirer of Aristotle's rhetoric. Hobbes claimed to have broken new ground in moral and political philosophy by deducing these precepts by a 'logic' in use in science and not by a form of reasoning peculiar to persuasion.
