Background

Thomas Hobbes was born on April 5, 1588, in Westport, adjoining Malmesbury, England. His father, also named Thomas Hobbes, was the vicar of Charlton and Westport, close to Malmesbury in Wiltshire, and in the wake of the precipitating scandal (caused by brawling in front of his own church), he disappeared, abandoning his three children to the care of his brother, Francis Hobbes.

Education

From age eight Hobbes, who was by this time proficient at reading and arithmetic, attended Mr. Evan's school in Malmesbury, then later Robert Latimer's private school in Westport. Hobbes showed his brilliance at this school and was an outstanding Greek and Latin scholar by the time he left this school at age fourteen, having already translated Euripides' Medea from Greek into Latin iambics.

After leaving Robert Latimer's school, he entered Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1603 where he continued to be supported financially by his uncle Francis. At that time the teaching at Oxford was dominated by a study of Aristotle and Hobbes soon found that his opinions differed sharply from what was being taught. He graduated with a Bachelor of Arts degree in 1608.

Career

In 1608, on the recommendation of Sir James Hussey, Principal of Magdalen Hall, Thomas Hobbes became the tutor of William Cavendish, later the Second Earl of Devonshire. For around two years Hobbes did little in the way of academic studies, being more of a companion to Cavendish who was only a little younger than he was.

In 1610 Hobbes went with Cavendish on a European tour and they visited France, Germany, and Italy. He learned French and Italian on this trip, but more importantly, it reinvigorated his desire for learning and he decided that he would pursue a study of classics. On his return, Hobbes took up studying Greek and Latin again. He had progressed from being a tutor to Cavendish to being his secretary and having few duties he had plenty of time to devote to his studies.

In 1626, on the death of his father, William Cavendish inherited the title the Earl of Devonshire, but two years later William died and Hobbes lost a friend as well as his secretarial post. William Cavendish's son was only eleven years old and Hobbes' services were no longer required by the Cavendish family at this time.

Hobbes was tutor to the son of Sir Gervase Clinton of Nottinghamshire, from 1628 to 1631. During this period, in 1629, he published his translation of Thucydides which he had been working on for several years. He undertook a second trip to the continent from 1629 to 1631 with his new pupil.

In 1631 the Cavendish family requested his services again and he returned from Paris to become a tutor to the third Earl of Devonshire, a position he held from 1631 to 1642. During this time he again visited the continent, being there from 1634 to 1637. On the continent, he met Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi, and Roberval and became enthusiastic about the mechanical universe and began building his philosophical position relating everything to motion. In fact, his views at this time appeared to be very much in line with the latest scientific ideas of the period.

Back in England in 1637, Hobbes worked on The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic which was not published at the time. He described his mechanistic approach to perception in this work as follows: "Whatsoever accidents or qualities our senses make us think there be in the world, they be not there, but are seemings and apparitions only; the things that really are in the world without us, are those motions by which these seemings are caused."

When the Civil War began in 1640 Hobbes feared for his life, especially as he was a well known Royalist, and he fled to save his life. He lived in Paris from 1640 where again he made contact with Mersenne's circle of scholars. There he wrote his objections to Descartes' Meditations and he published De Cive in 1642 which contained his ideas on the relation between the church and the state. After this, he worked on optics, which was one of his favorite topics.

Hobbes published a new expanded edition of De Cive in 1647, then three years later, in 1650, his earlier work The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic was published without his permission. It appeared in two parts as Humane Nature and De Corpore Politico.

Hobbes was the mathematics tutor of the Prince of Wales between 1646 and 1648. He remained on the continent until 1651, the year his most famous work Leviathan was published then, late in that year, he returned to England. In fact, he was now in some difficulties with all sides of the political spectrum. In England, the Royalists, with Charles I dead, seemed to have lost their struggle for power. Passages near the end of the Leviathan appeared to indicate that Hobbes was trying to make his peace with the English government, which angered the Royalists. In fact, in these passages, Hobbes was remaining consistent with his view that one showed allegiance to a ruler only so long as that ruler could provide protection. Hobbes had also attacked the Roman Catholic Church which made his position in Paris pretty untenable.

In 1655 Hobbes published De Corpore which, was one part of his trilogy of philosophy. He had already published De Cive (1642) and the third part, De Homine, would appear in 1658. De Corpore contained a large amount of mathematical material; in fact Chapters 12 to 20 are devoted entirely to the topic.

In 1660 Hobbes attacked the "new" methods of mathematical analysis. In Dialogus Physicus, sive de Natura Aeris (1661) he attacked Boyle and those setting up the Royal Society which, as a matter of interest, never elected Hobbes as a Fellow (it is probably that since he was perceived as an atheist entry would have been impossible). The mathematician John Wallis replied with telling mathematical arguments, but also with unfair charges of disloyalty. Hobbes could win arguments when his morality was attacked, but when it came to mathematics Wallis had a clear upper hand understanding mathematics far more deeply than Hobbes.

Hobbes defended his mathematical works to the end of his life. His errors were demonstrated so clearly that by 1670 essentially everyone considered him a mathematical illiterate, yet still he wrote articles in his defense even though it is doubtful whether anyone continued to read them.

Thomas Hobbes was 91 years old when he died, a remarkable age for someone in that period. At age 87 he completed translating the Iliad and the Odyssey into English verse and left London, where he had lived for many years, and spent his final years with the Cavendish family with whom he had been so closely connected throughout his life. His final words are reported to have been: "I am about to take my last voyage, a great leap in the dark."

Achievements

• Thomas Hobbes was a prominent English philosopher, who is best known for his excellent work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan marked the foundation for numerous Western political philosophies taking into account the perspective of social contract theory. He is chiefly famous for his excellence of absolutism for the sovereign, but simultaneously he also established some fundamentals of European liberal thought. Apart from the same, he also devoted time in a various array of fields like history, geometry, physics of gases, theology, ethics, general philosophy, and political science. Hobbes take on human nature as self-interested cooperation also proved to be an enduring theory in the philosophical anthropology stream. Hobbes was amongst the primary founders of materialism in philosophy.

Works

More photos

• book

  • Human Nature and De Corpore Politico

    (Thomas Hobbes' timeless account of the human condition, f...)

    1650
  • Leviathan 1651
  • The elements of Law Natural and Politic 1640

Religion

Thomas Hobbes wasn't religious.

Politics

Hobbes promoted that monarchy is the best form of government and the only one that can guarantee peace. In some of his early works, he only says that there must be a supreme sovereign power of some kind in society, without stating definitively which sort of sovereign power is best. In Leviathan, however, Hobbes unequivocally argues that absolutist monarchy is the only right form of government. In general, Hobbes seeks to define the rational bases upon which civil society could be constructed that would not be subject to destruction from within. Accordingly, he delineates how best to minimize discord, disagreement, and factionalism within society - whether between state and church, between rival governments, or between different contending philosophies. Hobbes believes that any such conflict leads to civil war. He holds that any form of ordered government is preferable to civil war. Thus he advocates that all members of society submit to one absolute, central authority for the sake of maintaining the common peace. In Hobbes's system, obedience to the sovereign is directly tied to peace in all realms. The sovereign is empowered to run the government, to determine all laws, to be in charge of the church, to determine first principles, and to adjudicate in philosophical disputes. For Hobbes, this is the only sure means of maintaining a civil, peaceful polity and preventing the dissolution of society into civil war.

Through his association with the Cavendish family, Hobbes entered circles where the activities of the king, members of Parliament, and other wealthy landowners were discussed, and his intellectual abilities brought him close to power (although he never became a powerful figure himself). Through these channels, he began to observe the influence and structures of power and government. Also, the young William Cavendish was a member of Parliament (1614 and 1621), and Hobbes would have sat in on various parliamentary debates. In the late 1630s, Hobbes became linked with the royalists in disputes between the king and Parliament, as the two factions were in conflict over the scope of kingly powers, especially regarding raising money for armies.

In 1640, Hobbes wrote a piece defending King Charles I's wide interpretation of his own rights in these matters, and royalist members of Parliament used sections of Hobbes' treatise in debates. The treatise was circulated, and The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic became Hobbes' first work of political philosophy (although he never intended it to be published as a book). The conflict then culminated in the English Civil Wars (1642-1651), which led to the king being executed and a republic being declared, and Hobbes left the country to preserve his personal safety, living in France from 1640 to 1651.

Views

Hobbes believed that all phenomena in the universe, without exception, can be explained in terms of the motions and interactions of material bodies. He did not believe in the soul, or in the mind as separate from the body, or in any of the other incorporeal and metaphysical entities in which other writers have believed. Instead, he saw human beings essentially as machines, with even their thoughts and emotions operating according to physical laws and chains of cause and effect, action, and reaction. As machines, human beings pursue their own self-interest relentlessly, mechanically avoiding pain and pursuing pleasure. Hobbes saw the commonwealth, or society, as a similar machine, larger than the human body and artificial but nevertheless operating according to the laws governing motion and collision.

In putting together this materialist view of the world, Hobbes was influenced by his contemporaries Galileo and Kepler, who had discovered laws governing planetary motion, thereby discrediting much of the Aristotelian worldview. Hobbes hoped to establish similar laws of motion to explain the behavior of human beings, but he was more impressed by Galileo and Kepler's mathematical precision than by their use of empirical data and observation. Hobbes hoped to arrive at his laws of motion deductively, in the manner of geometrical proofs. It is important to note that Hobbes was not in any position to prove that all of human experience can be explained in terms of physical and mechanical processes. That task would have required scientific knowledge far beyond that possessed by the seventeenth century. Even today, science is nowhere near being able to fully explain human experience in physical terms, even though most people tend to believe that science will one day be able to do just that. In the absence of such a detailed explanation, the image of the human being as a machine in Hobbes's writing remains more of a metaphor than a philosophical proof.

Hobbes rejected what we now know as the scientific method because he believed that the observation of nature itself is too subjective a basis on which to ground philosophy and science. Hobbes contested the scientific systems of the natural philosophers Francis Bacon and Robert Boyle. These major figures in the Scientific Revolution in England base their natural philosophy on a process of inductive reasoning, making inferences and conclusions based on the observation of nature and the manipulation of nature through experimentation. For Hobbes, the chief aim of philosophy is to create a totalizing system of truth that bases all its claims on a set of foundational principles and is universally demonstrable through the logic of language. He rejects the observation of nature as a means of ascertaining truth because individual humans are capable of seeing the world in vastly different ways. He rejects inductive reasoning, arguing that the results of contrived experiments carried out by a few scientists can never be universally demonstrable outside of the laboratory. Accordingly, Hobbes holds that geometry is the branch of knowledge that best approximates the reasoning that should form the basis of true philosophy. He calls for a philosophy based on universally agreed-upon first principles that form the foundation for subsequent assertions.

Hobbes maintained that the constant back-and-forth mediation between the emotion of fear and the emotion of hope is the defining principle of all human actions. Either fear or hope is present at all times in all people. In a famous passage of Leviathan, Hobbes states that the worst aspect of the state of nature is the "continual fear and danger of violent death." In the state of nature, as Hobbes depicts it, humans intuitively desire to obtain as much power and "good" as they can, and there are no laws preventing them from harming or killing others to attain what they desire. Thus, the state of nature is a state of constant war, wherein humans live in perpetual fear of one another. This fear, in combination with their faculties of reason, impels men to follow the fundamental law of nature and seek peace among each other. Peace is attained only by coming together to forge a social contract, whereby men consent to being ruled in a commonwealth governed by one supreme authority. Fear creates the chaos endemic to the state of nature, and fear upholds the peaceful order of the civil commonwealth. The contract that creates the commonwealth is forged because of people's fear, and it is enforced by fear. Because the sovereign at the commonwealth's head holds the power to bodily punish anyone who breaks the contract, the natural fear of such harm compels subjects to uphold the contract and submit to the sovereign's will.

Hobbes believed that in man's natural state, moral ideas do not exist. Thus, in speaking of human nature, he defines good simply as that which people desire and evil as that which they avoid, at least in the state of nature. Hobbes uses these definitions as bases for explaining a variety of emotions and behaviors. For example, hope is the prospect of attaining some apparent good, whereas fear is the recognition that some apparent good may not be attainable. Hobbes admits, however, that this definition is only tenable as long as we consider men outside of the constraints of law and society. In the state of nature, when the only sense of good and evil derives from individuals' appetites and desires, general rules about whether actions are good or evil do not exist. Hobbes believes that moral judgments about good and evil cannot exist until they are decreed by a society's central authority. This position leads directly to Hobbes's belief in an autocratic and absolutist form of government.

Hobbes saw mathematics as an essential part of knowledge. His approach is certainly consistently materialistic, denying abstract ideas; for Hobbes mathematics is the study of quantity, and quantities are the measures of 3-dimensional bodies. His definition of a point in De Corpore (which totally differs from that of Euclid) is as follows: "If the magnitude of a body which is moved (although it must always have some) is considered to be none, the path by which it travels is called a line, and the space it travels along a length, and the body itself is called a point. This is the sense in which the earth is usually called a point and the path of its annual revolution the ecliptic line." Lines, therefore, are the paths of moving points, surfaces are the paths of moving lines, volumes are the result of moving surfaces. It is fair to say that much of Hobbes' mathematical ideas are generalized from Galileo's study of mechanics and of motion. The new method of indivisibles, as put forward by Cavalieri, was accepted by Hobbes but he rejected Wallis's version as given in Arithmetica infinitorum.

Quotations: "Curiosity is the lust of the mind."

"Hell is truth seen too late."

"Leisure is the mother of Philosophy."

"The source of every crime, is some defect of the understanding; or some error in reasoning; or some sudden force of the passions. Defect in the understanding is ignorance; in reasoning, erroneous opinion."

"Force and fraud are in war the two cardinal virtues."

"Homo homini lupus."

Personality

As a young boy Hobbes was sometimes playful, but also sometimes withdrawn and melancholy.

Quotes from others about the person

• John Aubrey: "He had read much, if one considers his long life; but his contemplation was much more than his reading. He was wont to say that if he had read as much as other men he should have known no more than other men."

Interests

• Reading, foreign languages

• Philosophers & Thinkers

  Galileo, Kepler

Connections

Thomas Hobbes never married, remaining a bachelor the entirely of his long life. There is no evidence of him being in an intimate relationship with somebody.

Father:

Thomas Hobbes

Uncle:

Francis Hobbes

friend, pupil:

William Cavendish

In 1608, Thomas Hobbes became the tutor of William Cavendish, later the Second Earl of Devonshire.

References

• Mortal Gods: Science, Politics, and the Humanist Ambitions of Thomas Hobbes
  2011