Memory and Material in Early Modern England

Material Memorials > Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan

Leviathan, or, The matter, forme, & power of a common-wealth ecclesiasticall and civill. Title page

Leviathan's famous title page

Click here for item information Leviathan, or, The matter, forme, & power of a common-wealth ecclesiasticall and civill. pages 4-5

Hobbe's description of memory

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Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan, in addition to its lasting fame as a work of political theory, provides a sophisticated articulation of mechanism, a popular position in the late seventeenth century that held that all elements of the universe were reducible to physical principles. In Leviathan, therefore, Hobbes explains memory not as the storage of sensory experience but as the “decay” of physical sensory impressions, reversing many previous theories of how memory functioned but retaining a material concept of recollection.  

 

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