Hobbes and the political thought of Plato and Aristotle
pp. 191-218
in: , Selected papers on renaissance philosophy and on Thomas Hobbes, Berlin, Springer, 2004Abstract
Whereas the stream of Aristotelianism flows in a more or less constant and continuous flux through the history of philosophical thought, Platonism seems to be comparable rather to an undulating movement with irregular ups and downs. One of its highest peaks is of course reached in Neo-Platonism. Closer in time to Hobbes, we have the forceful development of Renaissance Platonism, starting from Marsilio Ficino's Florentine revival of the Academy, and producing thinkers such as Pico, Bruno or Campanella. Afterwards, and still during Hobbes' own lifetime, the torch was taken over by the Cambridge Platonists under the lead of Henry More and Ralph Cudworth. Both in his own generation and in the one or two that preceded him, Hobbes thus had ample opportunity to get confronted with Platonist doctrine. To be sure, his education at Magdalen Hall in Oxford was, according to his own testimony, exclusively a matter of Aristotelian school philosophy (OL I, LXXXVI f.).1 Yet the very fact that he soon became dissatisfied with what he had learned there, could have opened his mind for alternative bodies of doctrine, among which doubtlessly Plato's philosophy must be reckoned.