Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Though Hobbes did not fully reject the value of observational or ‘prudential’ knowledge, he dismissed the view that this was at all scientific or philosophical in nature. [5] To Hobbes, this type of knowledge was based on subjective and diverse experience, and was therefore capable of producing only speculative assumptions. [5]
Instead, Hobbes posits that man's own agency is the place for natural philosophy, once again drawing on geometry: "'as we know, that, if the figure shown be a circle, then any straight line through the centre shall divide it into two equal parts.' 'And this,' Hobbes said, 'is the knowledge required in a philosopher.'" [26] Thus, belief played ...
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.
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 never denied the capacity for human beings to band together or even to care for one another as a community; he denied that humanity as a species could do so. The properties of oxytocin would seem to suggest Hobbes was correct, as does an even cursory knowledge of the history of human civilizations.
In his Notes on the State of Virginia (1785), Thomas Jefferson uses the phrase bellum omnium in omnia ("war of all things against all things", assuming omnium is intended to be neuter like omnia) as he laments that the constitution of that state was twice at risk of being sacrificed to the nomination of a dictator after the manner of the Roman Republic.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
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]