Hobbes, universal names, and nominalism

This chapter addresses the nominalism of Thomas Hobbes. It begins by examining the ways in which Hobbes presented and argued for nominalist views in a series of works, including The Elements of Law (1641), Leviathan (1651), and De Corpore (1655). It then considers two prominent criticisms of Hobbes’s views. The first is a criticism from the seventeenth century, associated with the claim that Hobbes was an ultranominalist. This criticism, made by Descartes, More, and Leibniz, was that Hobbes’s view made it impossible for people speaking different languages to talk about the same thing. The second criticism, which has been prominent more recently, is that Hobbes fails to be a consistent nominalist, because his explanations appeal to similarity, and this appeal itself involves a universal.