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Thomas Hobbes (/ h ɒ b z / HOBZ; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679) was an English philosopher, best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, in which he expounds an influential formulation of social contract theory. [4]
Hobbes presents his own religious theory but states that he would defer to the will of the sovereign (when that was re-established: again, Leviathan was written during the Civil War) as to whether his theory was acceptable. Hobbes' materialistic presuppositions also led him to hold a view which was considered highly controversial at the time.
Hobbes was critical of the assumptions of scholastic philosophers, whose evidence for human nature was based upon Aristotelian metaphysics and Cartesian observation, as opposed to reasoning and definition. [5] Though Hobbes did not fully reject the value of observational or ‘prudential’ knowledge, he dismissed the view that this was at all ...
In some places, Berkeley's argument for blind obedience to a de facto authority resembles Thomas Hobbes's argument in Leviathan, on the grounds that rebellion can lead to anarchic violence and chaos which is worse than the worst tyranny (§§16, 47, 51), although Berkeley disagrees with Hobbes's idea that moral and political obligation ...
The idea of political obligation is philosophical, focusing on the morality of laws, rather than justice. Discussion of political obligation grew during the era of social contract theory, in which Thomas Hobbes and John Locke were crucial in explaining the idea and its importance. Political obligation is distinct from legal obligation.
In moral philosophy, consequentialism is a class of normative, teleological ethical theories that holds that the consequences of one's conduct are the ultimate basis for judgement about the rightness or wrongness of that conduct.
President Joe Biden announced he would commute the sentences of 37 individuals on federal death row. Here's what that means.
The first modern philosopher to articulate a detailed contract theory was Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679). According to Hobbes, the lives of individuals in the state of nature were "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short", a state in which self-interest and the absence of rights and contracts prevented the "social", or society. Life was "anarchic ...