A. Individual Paper Abstracts (in alphabetical order by author's last name) Abbott, Don,
[email protected] Academic institution: University of California, Davis The Geometer as Rhetor: Thomas Hobbes on the Performance of Rhetoric Thomas Hobbes’s chance encounter of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry proved to be a defining moment in his life. Hobbes’s biographer reports that working through a problem posed by Euclid “made him in love with geometry.” So profound was this love of geometry that many scholars believe it caused Hobbes’s to reject humanism and rhetoric in an effort to replace traditional disciplines with scientific and mathematical knowledge. Yet while Hobbes certainly pursued mathematics with enthusiasm, he did not necessarily conclude that geometry and rhetoric are incompatible. Science (and philosophy), says Hobbes, is the “knowledge of the consequences of words.” This knowledge, like geometry itself, must begin with the recognition of first principles which are then rendered into precise definitions. The “sorts” of sciences, says Hobbes “are many, according to the diversity of the Matter” and he specifically includes rhetoric among these. He accompanies his definition of science with a chart categorizing the entirety of human knowledge. Rhetoric is one of the forms of knowledge which derives from the “consequences of speech” together with ethics, poetry, logic, and “the science of the just and the unjust.” Hobbes, then, assigns rhetoric a place among the human sciences, and yet he remains a persistent critic of rhetoric. It is important to note, however, that Hobbes criticizes not the science of rhetoric, but rather its performance. It is the performance of rhetoric by unscrupulous orators that causes sedition and chaos because powerful speakers “can turn their Auditors out of fools into madmen.” Hobbes’s program, then, especially in Leviathan, is to find a way to reform rhetoric in order to make its performance consistent with the principles of geometry.