Although Hobbes is rightly associated with the early modern scientific revolution, and the repudiation of scholastic thought, there are certain significant parallels between his view of the divisions of knowledge and those proposed by Plato. In particular, Hobbes argues for the difference between 'scientific' knowledge, which is of consequences, and has geometrical thought for its model, and knowledge of experience, of particular facts. This appears to exactly mirror the Platonic distinction between doxa and episteme, between the unreliable knowledge of common sense and the certain truths afforded by philosophical reason. Both Plato and Hobbes thus believed in a kind of thinking which affords certainty, on which philosophical thought should be modelled, despite the fact that Hobbes is a mechanist and a materialist who utterly rejects the metaphysics of form in either its Platonic or its Aristotelian versions.

Of course, both Plato and Hobbes were quite correct in thinking that there really are differences between what we might call practical reason and the kind of thinking involved in mathematics and geometry, and that the latter are capable of affording greater precision and certainty. Nor is it clear that either Plato or Hobbes thought of the truths of geometrical reason as unconditionally certain, as both are well aware of the need for sound axioms and definitions on which all subsequent deductions have to rest. Hobbes is even critical of Plato for thinking that rulers ought to be made to study geometry itself (Lev. Ch. 31); all that is needed is to have 'sufficiently or probably proved all the theorems of moral doctrine for sovereignty to be able to 'convert this truth of speculation, into the utility of practice', i.e. reasoning in the geometrical style rather than geometry itself.

But where both Hobbes and Plato might be said to have gone wrong is in thinking that philosophical thought can ever imitate the precision and certainty of formal reasoning, and in thinking that if it could, beneficial practical consequences would be at least very likely to follow. While both of them were exposed to too much political turmoil in their own lifetimes to be unaware of the impact of events, neither of them is as willing to confront the importance of fortuna, or contingency, in human affairs as, say, Machiavelli. Aristotle is in this respect much to be preferred to Plato.