Thomas+Hobbes

__BIOGRAPHY__
 * Thomas Hobbes **


 * Born in London in the year 1588. Died in 1679.
 * Education from Oxford University in England, were he studied classics.
 * He continuously travelled throughout Europe in order to meet with scientists and study different forms of government.
 * Due to this, he became interested in what would be the best form of government for England.

__EXPLANATION OF KEY TEACHINGS & IDEAS__


 * After studying and exploring, he believed that an absolute monarchy was best.
 * Humans were basically selfish creatures who would do anything to better their position. Left to themselves, he thought, people would act on their evil impulses
 * Due to all of this, he believed that humans shouldn’t be trusted to make decisions on their own accord.
 * His ideal government should protect people from their own stupidity, therefore, its own selfishness and evil.
 * Nations acted based on their own selfish impulses, and ultimately they were battling for power and wealth.
 * Democracy was bad, because it was an outlet for people to promote their own self-interests and projects.
 * An authoritative leader was needed to provide stability and leadership.
 * Hobbes believed a legislature would ideally fend for the rights of the people in case the King would become cruel and unfair.
 * An individual could be heard in a government by authorizing a representative to speak on their behalf.
 * Hobbes was also a leading expert in optics.  mathematician- (specially geometry) and he was a disputant in metaphysics and epistemology.
 * He believed in deductive science- which was a science that deduces the workings of things from basic principles and true definitions of basic elements.
 * Hobbes insisted that the human being is selfish, and that our fundamental right as a result of such is to save our lives by whatever mean seems to be correct to us.
 * Hobbes was the first modern materialist. This meant that he believed that physical matter is the only thing there is, and that everything can be explained in terms of it.
 * Hobbes put forward the idea that physical matter is all there is (complete materialism), and that everything can be explained in terms of matter in motion. All individuals, even the world itself are machines.
 * Fear of death causes human beings to form societies.

__KEY WORKS__


 * **Leviathan (1651)** - In short, he argued that people were naturally wicked and could not trusted to govern over anything or anyone. On this masterpiece he presented thoughts on metaphysics, psychology & political philosophy. He advocates absolutist government as the only means of ensuring order. He advocates absolutist government as the only means of ensuring order.


 * **The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic (1650) -** Develops his political theory on the ideal types of governments, etc.

__QUOTES__

//“If men are naturally in a state of war, why do they always carry arms and why do they have keys to lock their doors?”//

//“All mankind [is in] a perpetual and restless desire for power... that [stops] only in death.”//

//“The value of worth of a man is, as of all things, his price.”//

//“Words are wise men’s counters... but they are the money of fools.”//

// “The universe, that is the whole mass of things that are, is corporeal, that is to say body and hath the dimensions of magnitude, namely, length, breadth, and depth. Also every part of body is likewise body, and hath like dimensions. And, consequently, every part of the universe is body and that which is not body is no part of the universe. And because the universe is all, that which is not part of it is nothing, and, consequently nowhere” //

// “There is no such thing as perpetual tranquility of mind while we live here; because life itself is but motion, and can never be without desire, nor without fear, no more than without sense. Thomas Hobbes” //

// “Curiosity is the lust of the mind.” //

//“I’m about to take my last voyage. A great leap in the dark” (Last words)//



__CONNECTIONS__


 * “John Locke said people were born good. Thomas Hobbes was against that idea and said that people were born evil”.
 * Locke was a rather positive philosopher; he believed the exact opposite of what Hobbes did.
 * Relation with Descartes
 * He became fascinated with motion, influenced by Galileo. According to the old Aristotelian world view, which Galileo was fighting to overthrow, rest was self-evidently the natural state for physical bodies to be in. But according to Galileo all physical bodies without exception were in motion, including the Earth itself (and therefore everything on the Earth), and the natural thing was for any such body to go on moving in a straight line unless acted upon by a force. Hobbes found the idea haunting. It opened up for him the idea of total reality as consisting of matter in motion, and this became his overall conception.
 * Connection to ideas in Machiavelli’s The Prince: do whatever you think is right. Work for the greater good.

__INFLUENCE__


 * In physics, his work was influential on Leibniz, and led him into disputes with Boyle and the experimentalists of the early Royal Society.
 * In history, he translated Thucydides' //History of the Peloponnesian War// into English, and later wrote his own history of the Long Parliament.
 * In mathematics he was less successful, and is best remembered for his repeated unsuccessful attempts to square the circle.
 * Hobbes was a serious and prominent participant in the intellectual life of his time.

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- =** Gamble Endnotes: **=

==Hobbes is called "the first modern materialist," that is, matter is all there is. He called the mind a "soft machine." On a broader scale, Hobbes, after spending much time with Galileo, began to see all of life and the universe as founded upon //motion//. With this as a starting point, and combined with his materialism, Hobbes came to see all of existence, including humans, as a "vast machine," (Magee).==

==He saw movements toward and movements away. The first he called "appetite," the second, "aversion." With time and the additions of tother thinkers, this became the basis of much modern psychology, exploring various expressions of appetite and aversion such as like and dislike, love and hate, desire for survival and fear of death.==