Agostino Lupoli considers anew the skeptical elements in Hobbes’s Logica. At variance with Popkin’s approach, which he finds insufficient, and in the line with the late Arrigo Pacchi’s insights, which he intends to extend, he shows that the De corpore contains both more than traces of skepticism and a very engaged discussion of the thesis of Quod nihil scitur, the famous, but seldom read, book by Francis Sanchez, who taught philosophy and medicine in France in the early years of seventeenth (...) century. In line with nominalist logic, Sanchez makes a very sharp criticism of Aristotelian theory of the definition, whose ontological claims he criticizes. In accordance with this criticism is Hobbes’s strict nominalism, his tautological conception of the proposition as well as other elements in his logic. (shrink)

Given the seditious and, at the same time, ineradicable nature of religion, it is up to the political scientist to suggest to the sovereign how to action its two components in order to give them a form that is harmless to the state. For this purpose, Hobbes proposes a radical reform of worship capable of restraining it within the limits of that «Reason dictated to be done by the weak to the more potent men» and, therefore, cleaned of all alleged (...) supernatural, metaphysical and mysterious aspects superimposed on it by theologians. (shrink)