Reviewed by: Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes by Timothy Raylor Torrey Shanks Timothy Raylor, Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018. xvii + 334 pp. ISBN 9780198829690 In a meticulous and learned account of Thomas Hobbes’s lifelong relationship to rhetoric and humanism, Timothy Raylor takes up the peculiar but important challenge of proving that something did not happen. That something is Hobbes’s famed double turn, his rejection of humanist rhetoric followed later by a modified return to rhetoric, as defended in Quentin Skinner’s influential study, Reason and Rhetoric in the Philosophy of Hobbes (1996). Raylor presents a [End Page 121] Hobbes steadfast in his relationship to both rhetoric and humanism, in contrast to his sharper and unrepentant philosophical turn. The book is provocative in its scrutinizing and overturning of Skinner’s thesis, where it largely sets its sights. It also provokes questions beyond that horizon for the theory and practice of rhetoric in putatively rationalist philosophy. One of several important contributions of Philosophy, Rhetoric, and Thomas Hobbes is its laser-like focus on the specific rhetorical and humanist traditions from which Hobbes drew insight over the long span of his life. Attending closely to his early pedagogical pursuits with the Cavendish family, the book discerns Hobbes’s commitments among a broad range of humanist and rhetorical approaches available to him. It speaks of Raylor’s attunement to the rhetorical tradition that he weighs pedagogical activities and topics so significantly. The examination of Hobbes’s work as a young tutor and nascent poet take up his incontrovertibly rhetorical humanist phase, during which, Raylor emphasizes, he harbored the pragmatic and skeptical tendencies of a Tacitean more than a Ciceronian civic republican. While Hobbes’s translation of Thucydides distances him from Cicero, the The Briefe of the Art of Rhetorique reveals his enduring commitment to Aristotelian notions of rhetoric. Though he was no ethical Aristotelian, Hobbes found in the Rhetoric a guiding structure of thought that was further inflected through Francis Bacon. Drawing Bacon into the humanist fold, Raylor rightly challenges anachronistic habits of opposing aesthetics and reason, poetry and science, in seventeenth-century philosophy. One benefit is in his richly layered reading of an early poem, De mirabilibus pecci. The poem incorporates catalogue of wonders, travel writing, and epideictic rhetoric, intertwining aesthetic pleasure, knowledge of natural history, and currying favour. Hobbes’s humanism takes new shape here as a contribution to the concerns and methods of an emerging natural scientific inquiry. This is a less familiar Hobbes and a path not taken for a thinker who later championed materialism at the expense of experiential knowledge. Hobbes abandoned natural history, but other Aristotelian tenets endured: a division of knowledge into scientia and opinio and a rhetoric attuned to the passions and pragmatically aimed at persuasion over loftier ethical goals. Crucial evidence for this is found in Hobbes’s choice to teach Aristotle’s Rhetoric and to prepare a Latin Digest and English Briefe. The documents, Raylor argues, do not reject rhetorical humanist (read Ciceronian) culture, but rather offer “a reasonable interpretation and apt condensation of Aristotle” (169). Aristotelian rhetoric is instead the structure through which Hobbes would effect a momentous change a decade later. Reorienting Hobbes’s rhetorical humanist phase around a Baconian Aristotelianism leads to the conclusion that “[i]t is not rhetoric that Hobbes, at the end of the 1630s, rejects, but philosophy—philosophy as it has traditionally been practiced” (176). Philosophy becomes the problem and object of transformation, not rhetoric. Moreover, rhetorical study becomes the driving factor in this reconceptualization of ratiocination. [End Page 122] The Rhetoric helped Hobbes to see that too much of what passed for philosophy was not certain or universal but drawn upon arguments meant to persuade, yielding, at best, probable truths. The natural histories that once interested him are based merely on “experience of fact,” producing only appearances of knowledge (201). With the demotion of natural philosophy, Hobbes elevates and transforms the study of politics into a science grounded in logical demonstration of causes from clearly defined terms, like geometry. Civil philosophy, in other words, is torn from its rhetorical roots in dialectical reasoning, experiential or prudential knowledge, and persuasion...