Hobbes's Critique of the Aristotelian Doctrine of Categories

Hobbes aims to replace the Aristotelian philosophy: from the first studies in Oxford to the publication of De corpore, Hobbes’s critical confrontation with Aristotle extends widely (from logic to metaphysics, from physics to ontology, from anthropology to politics). In this essay the whole spectrum of the contrast between Hobbes and Aristotle is not presented: the analysis of this contrast is dedicated to a single theme, the doctrine of the categories, which mainly concerns the logic and which also involves some theoretical questions of natural philosophy. In order to understand the basis, the context and the reasons of the Hobbesian criticism of the Aristotelian doctrine of the categories, it is however necessary to frame the general background of his interpretation of the problem of knowledge. Hobbes bases the rational and demonstrative character of philosophical knowledge – modeled on mathematics and geometry – more on the theory of universals than on the relation between cause and effect, and for this reason he devotes himself to the criticism of the Aristotelian doctrine of the categories: while for Aristotle the categories are the most universal genres of being, for Hobbes they are only names, or denominations. Moreover, in the Hobbesian philosophy the ten Aristotelian categories are reduced to only two: body and accident.