Identity in Hobbes: Between Physics and Anthropology

This article tackles the question of individual identity in Hobbes’s philosophy of motion – with special reference to the second part of De corpore – and in Hobbes’s anthropology. On the one hand, I outline the new and specific meaning that the assimilation of identity to form acquires in the framework of Hobbes’s mechanistic theory of motion; on the other hand, I highlight the underlying tension between identity understood within physical causality, and identity as intrinsic to human affectivity. This tension hints at the presence of two distinct, mutually irreducible aspects of the notion of individual identity, namely sameness and selfhood. Finally, I suggest an interpretive perspective that links this ambivalence to the issue of Hobbes’s anthropological individualism.