Thomas Hobbes

1588-1679 · English · Political Philosophy, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Philosophy of Religion, Geometry and Optics

The condition of man... is a condition of war of every one against every one.

Thomas Hobbes was born in 1588 on the day the Armada was sighted — fear was his twin, he later said. The Civil War and the regicide of Charles I shaped everything he wrote. His Leviathan appeared in 1651 with a claim that was unsparing: without a sovereign power to overawe everyone, human life reverts to a war of every man against every man — solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.

Topics Thomas Hobbes addresses

• the state of nature
• the war of every man against every man
• life solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short
• the laws of nature
• natural right as the right to all things
• the social covenant
• authorization and the artificial person
• the commonwealth as mortal god
• absolute and undivided sovereignty
• the indivisibility argument against mixed government
• the inalienable right of self-preservation
• the geometrical method in political philosophy
• reason as reckoning with names
• sense, imagination, and language
• the passions, deliberation, and will
• the will as the last appetite
• liberty as absence of external impediment
• necessity as universal causal determination
• compatibilism
• the controversy with Bramhall
• the Fool who says there is no justice
• materialism and corporeal monism
• rejection of incorporeal substance
• the corporeal God

Converse with Thomas Hobbes on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Thomas Hobbes's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.