My primary research focus is the thought of the seventeenth century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, but my research broadly concerns issues related to materialism, perception, and philosophy of mind in that period.
Past work has examined topics such as the following: the laws of nature in Leviathan and their connection to geometrical definitions; Margaret Cavendish’s criticisms of Hobbes’s explanation of visual perception; the debate between Hobbes and Robert Boyle concerning experimentation and scientific knowledge; Hobbes’s objections to Descartes’s Meditations; and Hobbes’s view of the relationship between mathematics and natural philosophy.
I am the editor of A Companion to Hobbes in the Blackwell Companions to Philosophy series (2021). The entry I wrote for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy on Hobbes’s Philosophy of Science discusses some of the areas of Hobbes’s thought on which my work has focused.
I am currently working on the following: 1) a book-length project on Hobbes’s epistemology and method of demonstration in politics, natural philosophy, and history; 2) an article on Cavendish’s philosophical psychology; 3) a chapter on Hobbes’s principles of motion and use of these in his account of the imagination and the passion of curiosity.
I also have research interests in the following topics in bioethics: the nature of physician obligations, organ transplantation, and informed consent.
An abbreviated version of my CV is available here (last updated online November 2023).
Selected Papers
Motion as an Accident of Matter: Margaret Cavendish and Thomas Hobbes on Motion and Rest, Southern Journal of Philosophy 59.4 (2021): 495-522.
Hobbes’s Laws of Nature in Leviathan as a Synthetic Demonstration: Thought Experiments and Knowing the Causes, Philosophers’ Imprint 19.5 (2019): 1-23.
Natural Philosophy, Deduction, and Geometry in the Hobbes-Boyle Debate, Hobbes Studies 30 (2017): 83-107. Published Version.
Visual Perception as Patterning: Cavendish against Hobbes on Sensation, History of Philosophy Quarterly 33 (2016): 193-214. Published Version.
Hobbes on Natural Philosophy as ‘True Physics’ and Mixed Mathematics, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 56 (2016): 43-51. Published Version.
Demarcating Aristotelian Rhetoric: Rhetoric, the Subalternate Sciences, and Boundary Crossing, Apeiron 48 (2015): 99-122. Published Version.
The Wax and the Mechanical Mind: Reexamining Hobbes’s Objections to Descartes’s Meditations, British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22 (2014): 403-424. Published Version.
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Marcus Adams 