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This is expanded upon in De Cive: “… human nature… comprising the faculties of body and mind; . . . Physical force, Experience Reason and Passion". [6] Hobbes believes that as sensory organs process the movements of external stimuli, a range of different mental experiences take place, which in turn dictate human behaviour. [7]
Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 (Old Style), in Westport, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England.Having been born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes later reported that "my mother gave birth to twins: myself and fear."
Hobbes supervised an English translation of De Corpore, which was published in 1656. There were some changes, and a provocative appendix Six Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics was added. [ 7 ] It has been claimed that the translation was vitiated by errors, undermining its usefulness as a guide to Hobbes's philosophy of language . [ 8 ]
Hobbes' materialistic presuppositions also led him to hold a view which was considered highly controversial at the time. Hobbes rejected the idea of incorporeal substances and subsequently argued that even God himself was a corporeal substance. Although Hobbes never explicitly stated he was an atheist, many allude to the possibility that he was.
According to Hobbes, the outcome is that people choose to enter a social contract, giving up some of their liberties in order to enjoy peace. This thought experiment is a test for the legitimation of a state in fulfilling its role as " sovereign " to guarantee social order, and for comparing different types of states on that basis.
Hobbes' view was challenged in the eighteenth century [10] by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who claimed that Hobbes was taking socialized people and simply imagining them living outside of the society in which they were raised. He affirmed instead that people were neither good nor bad, but were born as a blank slate, and later society and the ...
Ward claimed in both places that Hobbes had plagiarised Walter Warner. [8] Before Leviathan , Wilkins certainly was not hostile to Hobbes, and in fact wrote a Latin poem for the 1650 Humane Nature; or the Fundamental Elements of Policy , an edition of part of the Elements of Law of Hobbes; and the preface to that book has been attributed to Ward.
In the philosophy of mind, innatism is the view that the mind is born with already-formed ideas, knowledge, and beliefs. The opposing doctrine, that the mind is a tabula rasa (blank slate) at birth and all knowledge is gained from experience and the senses, is called empiricism.