Ch.I
2. What is the ultimate source and foundation for all our thoughts, according to Hobbes? (Does Hobbes give any justification for his answer to this question?)
3. (a) On Hobbes' view, how does sensation work?
(b) More specifically, how does Hobbes explain our sensations of "heat, cold, hardness, and softness"? And how is Hobbes' explanation related to Descartes' (that we saw in Ch.1 of The World)?
Ch.II
4. Why, according to Hobbes, do humans (including Aristotle and Kepler) often think that a moving body will naturally tend to come to rest? And what does Hobbes consider "absurd" about this idea?
5. What is imagination (memory)? Why do our memories tend to fade away?
6. Can we imagine something we've never sensed?
Ch.IV
7. What does language allow us to do that we would not be able to do without it?
8. Why does Hobbes hold such a high opinion of geometry, a subject he calls "the only science that it hath pleased God hitherto to bestow upon mankind"?
9. Why are definitions so important?
10. What's wrong with the phrase "incorporeal substance"?
2. How does the mechanical philosophy differ from that of the Peripatetics (= Aristotelians) and the Chemists (= Paracelsus' followers)?
3. What does Boyle think are the primary virtues or benefits of the mechanical philosophy?
4. How does Boyle argue for the universality of the mechanical philosophy, i.e., for the claim that everything, no matter how big or small, how complex or simple, can be accounted for by mechanical principles?
5. What is wrong, according to Boyle, with explanations of natural phenomena that appeal to 'the soul of the world,' or explanations of disease that appeal to witches or the devil? (see especially p.144 and 150)
6. Does Boyle consider his mechanical philosophy a competitor to other accounts of the natural world? Why or why not?
7. (More difficult) What is Boyle's matter? What are its characteristics?
8. What are the similarities, and what are the differences, between Boyle's mechanical philosophy compare to Descartes' views?