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| Thomas Hobbes | |
|---|---|
| Hobbes by John Michael Wright | |
| Born | 5 April 1588 Westport, Wiltshire, England |
| Died | 4 December 1679 (aged 91) Derbyshire, England |
| Alma mater | Magdalen Hall, Oxford St John’s College, Cambridge |
| Era | 17th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western philosophy |
| School | Social contract Classical realism Empiricism Determinism Nominalism[1] Materialism[1] Corpuscularianism[2] Ethical egoism |
| Main interests | Political philosophy, history, ethics, geometry |
| Influences[show] | |
| Influenced[show] |
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Thomas Hobbes (/hɒbz/; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury,[4] was an English philosopher, considered to be one of the founders of modern political philosophy.[5][6] Hobbes is best known for his 1651 book Leviathan, which expounded an influential formulation of social contract theory.[7] In addition to political philosophy, Hobbes also contributed to a diverse array of other fields, including history, jurisprudence, geometry, the physics of gases, theology, ethics, and general philosophy.
Biography
Early life and education
Thomas Hobbes was born in Westport, now part of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England, on 5 April 1588.[8] 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.”[9] His childhood is almost completely unknown, and his mother’s name is unknown.[10] His father, Thomas Sr., was the vicar of Charlton and Westport. Thomas Hobbes, the younger, had a brother Edmund, about two years older, and a sister. Hobbes’ father, according to John Aubrey, Hobbes’ biographer, was uneducated and “disesteemed learning”.[11] Thomas Sr. was involved in a fight with the local clergy outside his church, forcing him to leave London. The family was left in the care of Thomas Sr.’s older brother, Francis, a wealthy glove manufacturer with no family. Hobbes Jr. was educated at Westport church from age four, passed to the Malmesbury school, and then to a private school kept by a young man named Robert Latimer, a graduate of the University of Oxford. Hobbes was a good pupil, and between 1601 and 1602 he went up to Magdalen Hall, the predecessor college to Hertford College, Oxford, where he was taught scholastic logic and physics.[12][13][14] The principal John Wilkinson was a Puritan, and he had some influence on Hobbes. Before going up to Oxford, Hobbes translated Euripides‘ Medea from Greek into Latin verse.[11]
At university, Hobbes appears to have followed his own curriculum; he was “little attracted by the scholastic learning.” Leaving Oxford, Hobbes completed his B.A. degree by incorporation at St John’s College, University of Cambridge in 1608.[15] He was recommended by Sir James Hussey, his master at Magdalen, as tutor to William, the son of William Cavendish, Baron of Hardwick (and later Earl of Devonshire), and began a lifelong connection with that family.[16] William Cavendish was elevated to the peerage on his father’s death in 1626, holding it for two years before his death in 1628, and his son, also William, became the 3rd Earl of Devonshire. Hobbes served as a tutor and secretary to both men. The 1st Earl’s younger brother, Charles Cavendish, had two sons who were patrons of Hobbes. The elder son, William Cavendish, later 1st Duke of Newcastle, was a leading supporter of Charles I during the civil war personally financing an army for the king, having been governor to the Prince of Wales, Charles James, Duke of Cornwall. It was to this William Cavendish that Hobbes dedicated his Elements of Law.[11]
Hobbes became a companion to the younger William and they both took part in a grand tour of Europe between 1610 and 1615. Hobbes was exposed to European scientific and critical methods during the tour, in contrast to the scholastic philosophy that he had learned in Oxford. In Venice, Hobbes made the acquaintance of Fulgenzio Micanzio, an associate of Paolo Sarpi, a Venetian scholar and statesman.[11] His scholarly efforts at the time were aimed at a careful study of classic Greek and Latin authors, the outcome of which was, in 1628, his great translation of Thucydides‘ History of the Peloponnesian War, the first translation of that work into English from a Greek manuscript. It has been argued that three of the discourses in the 1620 publication known as Horea Subsecivae: Observations and Discourses also represent the work of Hobbes from this period.[17]
Although he associated with literary figures like Ben Jonson and briefly worked as Francis Bacon‘s amanuensis, translating several of his Essays into Latin,[11] he did not extend his efforts into philosophy until after 1629. In June 1628, his employer Cavendish, then the Earl of Devonshire, died of the plague, and his widow, the countess Christian, dismissed Hobbes.[citation needed][18]
In Paris (1630–1637)
Thomas Hobbes
Hobbes soon found work as a tutor to Gervase Clifton, the son of Sir Gervase Clifton, 1st Baronet mostly spent in Paris until 1631. Thereafter, he again found work with the Cavendish family, tutoring William Cavendish, 3rd Earl of Devonshire, the eldest son of his previous pupil. Over the next seven years, as well as tutoring, he expanded his own knowledge of philosophy, awakening in him curiosity over key philosophic debates. He visited Galileo Galilei in Florence while he was under house arrest upon condemnation, in 1636, and was later a regular debater in philosophic groups in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne.[citation needed]
Hobbes’s first area of study was an interest in the physical doctrine of motion and physical momentum. Despite his interest in this phenomenon, he disdained experimental work as in physics. He went on to conceive the system of thought to the elaboration of which he would devote his life. His scheme was first to work out, in a separate treatise, a systematic doctrine of body, showing how physical phenomena were universally explicable in terms of motion, at least as motion or mechanical action was then understood. He then singled out Man from the realm of Nature and plants. Then, in another treatise, he showed what specific bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation, knowledge, affections and passions whereby Man came into relation with Man. Finally, he considered, in his crowning treatise, how Men were moved to enter into society, and argued how this must be regulated if people were not to fall back into “brutishness and misery”. Thus he proposed to unite the separate phenomena of Body, Man, and the State.[citation needed]
In England
Hobbes came home, in 1637, to a country riven with discontent, which disrupted him from the orderly execution of his philosophic plan. However, by the end of the Short Parliament in 1640, he had written a short treatise called The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic. It was not published and only circulated as a manuscript among his acquaintances. A pirated version, however, was published about ten years later. Although it seems that much of The Elements of Law was composed before the sitting of the Short Parliament, there are polemical pieces of the work that clearly mark the influences of the rising political crisis. Nevertheless, many (though not all) elements of Hobbes’s political thought were unchanged between The Elements of Law and Leviathan, which demonstrates that the events of the English Civil War had little effect on his contractarian methodology. However, the arguments in Leviathan were modified from The Elements of Law when it came to the necessity of consent in creating political obligation. Namely, Hobbes wrote in The Elements of Law that Patrimonial kingdoms were not necessarily formed by the consent of the governed, while in Leviathan he argued that they were. This was perhaps a reflection either of Hobbes’s thoughts about the engagement controversy or of his reaction to treatises published by Patriarchalists, such as Sir Robert Filmer, between 1640 and 1651.[citation needed]
When in November 1640 the Long Parliament succeeded the Short, Hobbes felt that he was in disfavour due to the circulation of his treatise and fled to Paris. He did not return for 11 years. In Paris, he rejoined the coterie around Mersenne and wrote a critique of the Meditations on First Philosophy of Descartes, which was printed as third among the sets of “Objections” appended, with “Replies” from Descartes, in 1641. A different set of remarks on other works by Descartes succeeded only in ending all correspondence between the two.
Hobbes also extended his own works in a way, working on the third section, De Cive, which was finished in November 1641. Although it was initially only circulated privately, it was well received, and included lines of argumentation that were repeated a decade later in Leviathan. He then returned to hard work on the first two sections of his work and published little except a short treatise on optics (Tractatus opticus) included in the collection of scientific tracts published by Mersenne as Cogitata physico-mathematica in 1644. He built a good reputation in philosophic circles and in 1645 was chosen with Descartes, Gilles de Roberval and others to referee the controversy between John Pell and Longomontanus over the problem of squaring the circle.