Archivi tag: Descartes

This article investigates the opposing solutions provided by Descartes and Hobbes on the issue of human individuality. Both solutions need to be understood through the physical and metaphysical problem that both Descartes and Hobbes share: that is the problem of 'individual bodies'. Being confronted with this issue, the two thinkers face similar difficulties. The hypothesis maintained here is that the removal of the theoretical obstacles arising from the issue of the uniqueness of the extended substance - and the consequent impossibility of conceiving the existence of individual bodies - allows Descartes, and no less Hobbes, to elaborate a conception of the human being as a separate field that is distinguished from the rest of nature.