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The Elements of Law provides insight into Hobbes’s moral philosophy through ideas of sensation, pleasure, passion, pain, memory and reason. [6] This is expanded upon in De Cive: “… human nature… comprising the faculties of body and mind; . . . Physical force, Experience Reason and Passion". [6]
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."
Hale's definition of the natural law reads: "It is the Law of Almighty God given by him to Man with his Nature discovering the morall good and moral evill of Moral Actions, commanding the former, and forbidding the latter by the secret voice or dictate of his implanted nature, his reason, and his concience."
[citation needed] Some defenders of natural rights theory, however, counter that the term "natural" in "natural rights" is contrasted with "artificial" rather than referring to nature. John Finnis, for example, contends that natural law and natural rights are derived from self-evident principles, not from speculative principles or from facts. [37]
This view of the state of nature is partly deduced from Christian belief (unlike Hobbes, whose philosophy is not dependent upon any prior theology). Although it may be natural to assume that Locke was responding to Hobbes, Locke never refers to Hobbes by name, and may instead have been responding to other writers of the day, like Robert Filmer. [8]
In contrast to the simply informative titles usually given to works of early modern political philosophy, such as John Locke's Two Treatises of Government or Hobbes's own earlier work, The Elements of Law, Hobbes selected a poetic name for this more provocative treatise.
The English philosopher's analysis about the state of nature resonates today, but if anything he wasn't pessimistic enough.
Thomas Hobbes, in his seminal work Leviathan, offered the first detailed theory of law as based on sovereign power. As Jean Elizabeth Hampton writes, "law is understood [by Hobbes] to depend on the sovereign's will. No matter what a law's content, no matter how unjust it seems, if it has been commanded by the sovereign, then and only then is it ...