Frontispiece of De Cive

Frontispiece of De Cive

Here we have the frontispiece, or illustration facing the title page, of Thomas Hobbes’s De Cive, commonly translated as “On the citizen.” I have chosen this work as illustrative of the general trends in philosophical writings of the time that contributed to the furthering of education. In his essay “Artisans and the New Science of Politics in Early Modern Europe” Luis R. Corteguera writes that “central to Hobbes’s project of a new civil science was the idea that wisdom can be acquired ‘by contemplating things as they are in themselves’” (602). Truly understanding what something is sounds like the goal of science in the modern day, but was that how people in the 17th century thought of science? Paolo Rossi summarizes Sir Francis Bacon’s, a contemporary of Hobbes, concept of science as “things as they really are, […] not in relation to man but in relation to the universe” (Corteguera 602). This statement supports the idea that Hobbes’s suggested route to acquiring wisdom is practicing the study of science. Scientific practices were becoming integrated into society as a method of acquiring wisdom—which is the purpose of education—through these writings. The fact that Hobbes and Bacon were both heavily involved in what we today would call the “hard sciences” also demonstrates that scientific thought and methods had clearly spread throughout the intellectual community in this time. Hobbes and others are communicating this idea of scientific thought and education to others throughout Europe through their writings, slowly propagating the idea of a modern science-based education.

Jean Matheus

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hobbes_de_cive.jpg

1642

Benjamin Wightman