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The novel's protagonist, Roy Complain, lives in a culturally primitive tribe on a massive generation ship, which has descended into an uncivilized state. The ship is overgrown by vegetation, and the inhabitants have clustered into warring tribes. In Roy's tribe, curiosity is discouraged, and life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
State of nature. In ethics, political philosophy, social contract theory, religion, and international law, the term state of nature describes the hypothetical way of life that existed before humans organised themselves into societies or civilisations. [1] Philosophers of the state of nature theory propose that there was a historical period ...
Thomas Hobbes famously said that in a "state of nature", human life would be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short". In the absence of political order and law, everyone would have unlimited natural freedoms, including the "right to all things" and thus the freedom to plunder, rape and murder; there would be an endless "war of all against ...
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). The common modern English usage is a war of " each against all " where war is rare and terms such as ...
Leviathan or The Matter, Forme and Power of a Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil, commonly referred to as Leviathan, is a book written by Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) and published in 1651 (revised Latin edition 1668). [1][5][6] Its name derives from the biblical Leviathan. The work concerns the structure of society and legitimate government ...
Thomas Hobbes in the 17th century declared indigenous culture to have "no arts, no letters, no society" and he described facing life as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short." He, like other scholars of his time, reasoned that everything positive and esteemed resulted from the slow development away from this poor lowly state of being. [3]
Hobbes reasoned that this world of chaos created by unlimited rights was highly undesirable, since it would cause human life to be "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". As such, if humans wish to live peacefully they must give up most of their natural rights and create moral obligations to establish political and civil society.
Thomas Hobbes described the state of nature as "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" (Leviathan, Chapters XIII–XIV). [134] Locke takes a more benign view of the state of nature and is unwilling to take as hard a stance on the degeneracy of the state of nature. He does agree that it is equally incapable of providing a high quality of life.