The Monstrosity of Matter in Motion: Galileo, Descartes, and Hobbes’s Political Epistemology

The seventeenth century, the century of the scientific revolution, was populated by monsters, monsters that the new mechanical science was challenging, and also monsters that it had a part in generating. Descartes’s and Hobbes’s philosophical systems played a key role in providing a metaphysical foundation to the new science of motion both in the natural and in the political domain. Focusing on the monstrosity of ‘matter in motion’, my aim is to suggest that their philosophical efforts, although apparently opposed, shared the same ideological reaction to the monstrous contingency of ‘matter’ evidenced by the experimental practices carried on during the first half of the century in both natural philosophy and the English Civil War.