This issue materialises an idea of Martin Bertman, the late founder of Hobbes Studies, and I am very happy to have brought to fruition his project of devoting a special issue of the review to topics related to Hobbes’s natural philosophy. The four essays collected here show that a lot of water has passed under the bridge since Frithiof Brandt’s Thomas Hobbes’ Mechanical Conception of Nature and that nowadays critical interest is no longer so biased in favour of the political and ethical aspects of his philosophy. Two of the essays (by Henry and Jesseph) deal with two key topics of Hobbes’s physics – motus circularis simplex and conatus. The other two (Medina and Giudice) deal with optics. The doctrines of simple circular motion and of conatus are crucial to an understanding of the theoretical peculiarity of Hobbes’s version of mechanical philosophy. Optics is a science (like geometry and politics) of which he claimed to be the modern re-founder, as Giudice and Jesseph point out. However, over and above the topic each essay specifically addresses, between the lines they all evoke the delicate underlying problem of Hobbes’s epistemology. On what grounds can Hobbes claim to have preserved the “Aristotelian” deductive causal status of science – shielding it from the deadly attacks of sceptics – without ever contradicting his rigorous empirical and nominalist premises? The complete and complex answer to this question is found in De Corpore and has its core in the doctrine of the twofold consideration of phantasms as “internal accidents of our mind or as a species of external things” (species rerum externarum or accidentia animi interna).1

中文翻译：

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光学，简单圆周运动和 Conatus

本期体现了霍布斯研究的已故创始人马丁·伯特曼 (Martin Bertman) 的一个想法，我很高兴让他的计划得以实现，即在该评论的特刊中专门讨论与霍布斯自然哲学相关的主题。这里收集的四篇文章表明，自弗里西奥夫·布兰特的托马斯·霍布斯的《自然机械观》以来，桥下已经流过很多水，如今，批判的兴趣不再那么偏向于他的哲学的政治和伦理方面。其中两篇散文（由亨利和杰西夫撰写）涉及霍布斯物理学的两个关键主题——单纯形和圆心。另外两个（Medina 和 Giudice）处理光学问题。简单圆周运动学说和 conatus 学说对于理解霍布斯版本的机械哲学的理论特性至关重要。正如 Giudice 和 Jesseph 指出的那样，光学是一门科学（如几何学和政治学），他自称是现代的奠基人。然而，除了每篇文章具体解决的主题之外，在字里行间它们都唤起了霍布斯认识论的微妙潜在问题。霍布斯凭什么声称保留了科学的“亚里士多德”演绎因果地位——保护它免受怀疑论者的致命攻击——而不会与他严格的经验和唯名论前提相矛盾？这个问题的完整而复杂的答案可以在 De Corpore 中找到，其核心在于双重考虑幻象作为“我们心灵的内部意外或作为外部事物的一种”（species rerum externarum 或accidentia animi inna）的学说.1