Conoscenza e curiosità nella teoria ottica di Thomas Hobbes

The subject of this essay is the focus on the relationship between curiosity and knowledge in Thomas Hobbes’ mechanistic conception of nature as formulated in his theory of optics. Indubitably he played a key role in the rehabilitation of curiosity in the 17th-century. According to Hobbes, “curiosity” was a central passion of man, the idiosyncratic passion that set him apart from the animals. He defined curiosity as the desire for knowledge involving the search for the causes of things. However, this search could lead to very different results depending on the epistemological status of the disciplines. In Hobbes’ view it was one matter to identify the causes of phenomena in the field of politics or geometry, but quite a different thing in the field of natural philosophy. Hobbes began to elaborate this difference in the late 1630s during the course of his research on light and vision, offering the first kinematic explanation of the sine law of refraction. He was not only well aware of having created an original derivation of this law, but actually believed he had laid the foundation of a new science of optics, which in an important manuscript dated 1646, A Minute or First Draught of the Optiques, he defined as “the most curious” of all the sciences.