an introduction to the great philosopher Thomas hobbes

1. RIDDHI KARNIK
Thomas Hobbes
Source-online British library

2. Born: 5 April 1588 in Westport,
Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England
Died: 4 December 1679 in Hardwick Hall,
Derbyshire, England
English philosopher, scientist, and historian,
best known for his political philosophy,
especially as articulated in his masterpiece
Leviathan(1651).
Hobbes is the founding father of modern
political philosophy
 He was known as a scientist (especially in optics),
as a mathematician (especially in geometry), as a
translator of the classics, as a writer on law, as a
disputant in metaphysics and epistemology.

3. Education
 Attended Robert Latimer's school, he entered
Magdalen Hall, Oxford in 1603
 He graduated with a B.A. in 1608
 Languages mastered Italian, French, Greek and
Latin
 Hobbes was about forty years old before he
became fascinated by mathematics and in
1629, he published his translation of
Thucydides

4.  Met Galileo, Mersenne, Gassendi and Roberval &
became enthusiastic about the mechanical universe
and began building his philosophical position relating
everything to motion.
The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. 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.”

5. Works
 Civil War began in 1640 Hobbes fled and lived in
Paris
 Wrote De Cive (Concerning Citizenship) in 1642
which contained his ideas on the relation between
the church and the state.
 Hobbes's theory of optical images [was] developed
in his optical magnum opus "A minute of first
draught of the optiques" (1646) and published in
abridged version in "De homine" (1658).
 The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic was
published without his permission. It appeared in two
parts as Humane Nature (Human nature) and De
Corpore Politico (Of the body politic). This made
common people to understand law.

6.  Passages near the end of
the Leviathan appeared to indicate that
Hobbes was trying to make his peace with the
English government.
 Hobbes' masterpiece Leviathan set out his
ideas with great clarity.
 He argued that people want to live in peace
and security and to attain this they must
organise themselves into communities for
protection.

7. In mathematics, he corrected some principles of
geometry
 To exhibit a line equal to the arc of a circle, and a
square equal to the area of a circle, and this by
various methods.
 To divide an angle in a given ratio.
 To find the ratio of a cube to a sphere.
 To find any number of mean proportionals between
two given lines.
 To describe a regular polygon with any number of
sides.
 To find the centre of gravity of the quadrant of a
circle.
 To find the centres of gravity of all types of
parabolas.

8.  Motion and matter—the motion of a light
source, the disturbance of a physical nervous
system, and sensory membranes—are all that
have to be invoked. Thus disproved traditional
optics theory of Aristotle.
Thomas Hobbes diagram for ocular anatomy
Source – British Library

9.  Hobbes tends to be extremely sceptical about
human powers of judgment and reasoning, in his
writings
 For Hobbes, it is only science, "the knowledge
of consequences" (Leviathan, v.17), that offers
reliable knowledge of the future and
overcomes the frailties of human judgment.
"the wickedness of bad men also compels good
men to have recourse, for their own
protection, to the virtues of war, which are
violence and fraud." (De Cive, Epistle
Dedicatory)

10.  Theories that trace all observed effects to matter and
motion are called mechanical. Hobbes was thus a
mechanical materialist.
 He held that nothing but material things are real, and
he thought that the subject matter of all the natural
sciences consists of the motions of material things at
different levels of generality.
 Geometry considers the effects of the motions of
points, lines, and solids; pure mechanics deals with the
motions of three-dimensional bodies in a full space, or
plenum;
 Physics deals with the motions of the parts of
inanimate bodies insofar as they contribute to
observed phenomena; and
 psychology deals with the effects of the internal
motions of animate bodies on behaviour

11.  If the magnitude of a body which is
moved 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.
(De Corpore)

12.  Hobbes’s importance lies not only in his political
philosophy but also in his contribution to the
development of an anti-Aristotelian and
thoroughly materialist conception of natural
science.
 The materialist bent of Hobbes’s metaphysics is
also much in keeping with contemporary Anglo-
American, or analytic, metaphysics, which tends
to recognize as real only those entities that
physics in particular or natural science in general
presupposes.

13. References
 http://www-history.mcs.st-
and.ac.uk/Biographies/Hobbe
s.html Article by: J J
O'Connor and E F Robertson.
 Internet Encyclopaedia of
Philosophy
 Thomas Hobbes Britannica
Online Encyclopedia
 Online British Library