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DOUGLAS JESSEPH

Mathematics plays a prominent role in Hobbes’s grand intellectual project. In the course of more than two decades he published over a dozen mathematical works, ranging from brief pamphlets to synoptic treatments of the subject.¹ Quantity of output is no guarantee of its quality, however, and Hobbes’s mathematics is remembered primarily for his many failed attempts to square the circle and solve other famous mathematical problems. His long and humiliating controversy with John Wallis, Oxford’s Savilian Professor of Geometry, annihilated Hobbes’s mathematical reputation and has left the widely shared impression that there is nothing of value to be found in his many mathematical writings.² My purpose here is not to defend Hobbes’s attempts to solve what we now know to be unsolvable problems, but rather to examine the philosophical and methodological basis upon which his mathematics was founded and the broader context in which it developed. Toward that end, this chapter is divided in two sections. The first is an overview of Hobbes’s materialistic philosophy of mathematics. The second investigates his controversy with Wallis.