Liberté de conscience et arts de penser (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle): Mélanges en l'honneur d'Antony McKenna. Christelle Bahier-Porte, Pierre-François Moreau, and Delphine Reguig, eds. Les dix-huitièmes siècles 197. Paris: Honoré Champion, 2017. 850 pp. €98.
Baldin motivates his choice not to deal with Hobbes’s Short Tract. One of the greatest merits of the book is that it sheds light on the evolution of Hobbes’s thought on the issues under discussion and on the difficulties that Hobbes encountered in trying to account for physical phenomena such as terrestrial rotation, the tides, and the fluidity of bodies in mechanistic terms. However, Baldin’s reconstruction of this evolution suffers from two shortcomings. One is that it sometimes downplays the influence of important thinkers who propelled Hobbes’s thought in new directions. Baldin mentions, for example, a possible influence of Gassendi on Hobbes’s notions of inertia and gravity, but is silent about the strong similarities between Gassendi’s and Hobbes’s reinterpretations of Galileo’s theory of tides. The other defect is that Baldin handles the notion of “mechanical philosophy” as if it designated a monolithic whole, thereby neglecting the tension, to which Dijksterhuis and Westfall pointed long ago, between the ambition to explain the hidden corpuscular mechanisms behind phenomena and the attempt to describe them instead through exact mathematical laws. It is precisely this tension that, in my view, explains the discrepancies between mathematical descriptions and physical explanations that are so frequently present in Hobbes’s physics.