Philosophy and History in Thomas Hobbes: a reading of An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy

Abstract

This article discusses the function of history in the thought of Thomas Hobbes. The first part of the article considers Hobbes’s critique on the importance bestowed to experience and history by the classical humanist tradition, and his defense of the epistemic superiority of reason and philosophy. The second part focuses on his posthumous work An Historical Narration Concerning Heresy (1680), interpreting it in the light of the ecclesiastical history genre conventions and the English Restoration time’s political and religious debates. Finally, this study argues that this oeuvre is a kind of theoretically informed history, conceived to be a rhetorically effective intervention on a contemporary debate on heresy and its punishment, and on the ecclesiastical jurisdiction.