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Hobbes’s moral philosophy therefore provides justification for, and informs, the theories of sovereignty and the state of nature that underpin his political philosophy. [2] In utilising methods of deductive reasoning and motion science, Hobbes examines human emotion, reason and knowledge to construct his ideas of human nature (moral ...
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 in De Corpore states that the subject of philosophy is devoted to "bodies". He clarifies this by division: in English translation, natural philosophy is concerned with concept of "natural body" (Latin: corpus naturale), while the bodies called commonwealths are the concern of "civil philosophy". [5]
David Hume offers in A Treatise of Human Nature (1739) that human beings are naturally social: "'Tis utterly impossible for men to remain any considerable time in that savage condition, which precedes society; but that his very first state and situation may justly be esteem'd social. This, however, hinders not, but that philosophers may, if ...
The starting point for most social contract theories is an examination of the human condition absent any political order (termed the "state of nature" by Thomas Hobbes). [4] In this condition, individuals' actions are bound only by their personal power and conscience, assuming that 'nature' precludes mutually beneficial social relationships ...
Bellum omnium contra omnes, a Latin phrase meaning "the war of all against all", is the description that Thomas Hobbes gives to human existence in the state-of-nature thought experiment that he conducts in De Cive (1642) and Leviathan (1651).
These thinkers have had a long-lasting effect on our society, with Hobbes' egotistical human influencing economics and Rousseau's notion of the noble savage influencing child pedagogy and developmental psychology. But whereas Hobbes and Rousseau were working with hypotheticals and theories, "we have decades of scientific evidence" on which to draw.
Going further, the philosophical concept of nature or natures as a special type of causation - for example that the way particular humans are is partly caused by something called "human nature" is an essential step towards Aristotle's teaching concerning causation, which became standard in all Western philosophy until the arrival of modern science.