G. Baldin, Hobbes e Galileo: Metodo, Materia e Scienza del Moto

As Thomas Hobbes straightforwardly asserts in his Critique du De mundo, Galileo Galilei—whom Hobbes had occasion to meet in Arcetri during his third European Grand Tour—is to be considered “the greatest philosopher not only of our century, but of all centuries.” Indeed, as Hobbesian scholarship has often under- scored, the affinities between Galileo’s and Hobbes’s natural philosophies are abundant. Yet Gregorio Bal- din’s book is the first attempt at providing a general and comprehensive evaluation of the historical and the- oretical connections between the two thinkers. As Baldin thoroughly demonstrates, Galileo’s works were widely known, debated, and often translated, both inside the Newcastle circle that Hobbes attended during the 1630s and among Marin Mersenne’s acquaintances and correspondents. According to Baldin, Galileo’s influence contributed crucially to shaping the basic principles of Hobbes’s mechanistic philosophy. Hobbes’s nominalist and conventionalist theory of science, as well as his hypothetical approach to physics, indisputably distinguishes him from Galileo (pp. 107, 126). Nonetheless, the very core of Hobbes’s natural philosophy is Galilean: that is, the distinction between—in the later formulation of Robert Boyle—primary and secondary qualities; and the idea that the objective properties of things are mathematically quantifiable relationships be- tween moving bodies. This is a thesis that Baldin defends deftly and convincingly.