Abstract

Karl Schuhmann’s essay focuses on a central problem which Hobbes set out to remedy, namely, the politically disruptive potential of those making claims of immediate supernatural experience, based, for example, on dreams, the embassies of angels and visions. Confident of victory despite his variance not only with common but also learned opinion, Hobbes offers his natural philosophy as the way both to lay the ghosts of superstition and to prevent political aggrandizement through popular credulity. Tracing the philosopher’s use of the Greek concept of phantasia, as first employed by Aristotle and then in scholastic terminology, Schuhmann uncovers the political point contained in Hobbes’s insistence on motion and matter in his natural science