Thomas Hobbes

1. Thomas Hobbes By Sean Moran

2. Biography • Born April 5, 1588 in Wiltshire, England. He died on December 4, 1679 from complications due to a stroke. • He is most famous for his political work Leviathan, in which he produced his famous social contract theory. • Along with political science, Hobbes also made contributions in the fields of history, geometry, physics, theology, and ethics.

3. Education • As child he studied at the local Church School, where he learned and mastered Greek and Latin. • In 1602 at the age of 14 he went to Magdalen Hall at Oxford and graduated with a B.A. in 1608. At Oxford Hobbes studied his own curriculum, which consisted mainly of ancient Greek and Latin texts and cartography. • In 1610 he traveled to London and began communicating with scholars such as Francis Bacon, Ben Johnson, and Herbert of Cherbury.

4. Jobs • He became a tutor to William , the son of the Earl of Devonshire, from 1608 to 1628. While together the pair traveled to Paris in 1610, where he was first introduced to modern philosophy. • Hobbes served as a tutor to the children of other nobles as well, such as Sir Gervase Clifton. • He was rehired by the Cavendish family to tutor his former pupil’s son. • In 1647, he was the mathematics instructor to Charles, the Prince of Wales.

5. Philosophy • In 1636, he began debating with other philosophers in Florence and Paris. These philosophers included Marin Mersenne and Rene Descartes. While in Italy he met and discussed with Galileo. Galileo • By 1640, Hobbes had formed a plan to write three philosophical essays, with one each about matter, human nature, and society.

6. The Elements of law, Natural and political: Part I Human Nature, Part II de Corporo Politico • Hobbes never intended for this work to be published, but a unauthorized edition was published in 1650. • It focuses on man and society, the second and third parts of Hobbes’s philosophy ideas. • He applied physics to his philosophy saying that man is always in a state of motion being driven by emotions, fears, and desires. He also decided that man could be impacted by external factors, which in turn impacted his relationship with society.

7. Leviathan • Published in 1651, it was a response to the goodfeedback from colleagues of his work De Cive. He believed that De Cive was too hard to understand by the common man and wanted to make it easier to read. It was written amidst the turmoil of the English Civil War. • Hobbes wrote that man was naturally selfish and worked for desire only. Hobbes wrote of a state of nature, where government did not exist. In this state of nature, people would kill each other by fighting over everything. • To end this fighting a social contract was needed, an agreement between a people and a sovereign authority in order to be protected.

8. Leviathan continued • Hobbes rejected the separation of powers, believing that there should never be a time when the sovereign authority would need to be checked in power. Any problems, caused by this are just the price of peace that is needed to be paid. • He also wrote that people don’t go to Heaven or Hell after death, but are in one or the other while on Earth. This went against Church teachings and led to some friction between the Church and Hobbes.

9. Other Information • Many of his works, especially Leviathan, have lead people to think he was an atheist. Even in his lifetime, Parliament banned him from writing of worldly things and was planning on trying him for heresyand atheism but was stopped by Hobbes’s former pupil, now king, Charles II. • His last words were, “A great leap in the dark”, before he died from a bladder disorder caused by his stroke. He was interred in St. John the Baptist Church in Derbyshire, England.