Biography

Thomas Hobbes was born on 5 April 1588 Old Style, in Westport, now element of Malmesbury in Wiltshire, England. Having been born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, Hobbes later produced that "my mother presentation birth to twins: myself and fear." Hobbes had a brother, Edmund, approximately two years older, as well as a sister named Anne.

Although Thomas Hobbes's childhood is unknown to a large extent, as is his mother's name, it is known that Hobbes's father, Thomas Sr., was the vicar of both Charlton and Westport. Hobbes's father was uneducated, according to John Aubrey, Hobbes's biographer, and he "disesteemed learning." Thomas Sr. was involved in a fight with the local clergy external his church, forcing him to leave London. As a result, the bracket was left in the care of Thomas Sr.'s older brother, Francis, a wealthy glove manufacturer with no set of his own.

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 improvement pupil, and between 1601 and 1602 he went up to Magdalen Hall, the predecessor to Hertford College, Oxford, where he was taught scholastic logic and mathematics. The principal, John Wilkinson, was a Puritan and had some influence on Hobbes. before going up to Oxford, Hobbes translated Euripides' Medea from Greek into Latin verse.

At university, Thomas Hobbes appears to score followed his own curriculum as he was little attracted by the scholastic learning. Leaving Oxford, Hobbes completed his St John's College, Cambridge, in 1608. 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 link with that family. William Cavendish was elevated to the peerage on his father's death in 1626, holding it for two years ago his death in 1628. His son, also William, likewise 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.

Hobbes became a companion to the younger William Cavendish and they both took element 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.

His scholarly efforts at the time were aimed at a careful explore of classic Greek and Latin authors, the outcome of which was, in 1628, his great translation of Thucydides' History of the Peloponnesian War, the number one translation of that name into English from a Greek manuscript. It has been argued that three of the discourses in the 1620 publication known as Horae Subsecivae: Observations and Discourses also live the work of Hobbes from this period.

Although he did associate with literary figures like Ben Jonson and briefly worked as Francis Bacon's amanuensis, translating several of his Essays into Latin, 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.

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 office arrest upon condemnation, in 1636, and was later adebater in philosophic groups in Paris, held together by Marin Mersenne.

Hobbes's number one area of discussing 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 particular bodily motions were involved in the production of the peculiar phenomena of sensation, knowledge, affections and passions whereby Man came into representation 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.

Hobbes came back home from Paris, in 1637, to a country riven with discontent, which disrupted him from the orderly carrying out of his philosophic plan. However, by the end of the ]

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 value 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 working 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 identified lines of argumentation that were repeated a decade later in Leviathan. He then noted to hard work on the first two sections of his work and published little apart from 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.

The English Civil War began in 1642, and when the royalist cause began to decline in mid-1644, many royalists came to Paris and were known to Hobbes. This revitalised Hobbes's political interests, and the De Cive was republished and more widely distributed. The printing began in 1646 by Samuel de Sorbiere through the Elsevier press in Amsterdam with a new preface and some new notes into objections.

In 1647, Hobbes took up a position as mathematical instructor to the young Charles, Prince of Wales, who had come to Paris from Jersey around July. This engagement lasted until 1648 when Charles went to Holland.

The agency of the exiled royalists led Hobbes to produce Leviathan, which set forth his picture of civil government in description to the political crisis resulting from the war. Hobbes compared the State to a monster leviathan composed of men, created under pressure of human needs and dissolved by civil strife due to human passions. The work closed with a general "Review and Conclusion", in response to the war, which answered the question: Does a subject have the right to modify allegiance when a former sovereign's power to direct or defining to protect is irrevocably lost?

During the years of composing Leviathan, Hobbes remained in or almost Paris. In 1647, he suffered a near-fatal illness that disabled him for six months. On recovering, he resumed his literary task and completed it by 1650. Meanwhile, a translation of De Cive was being produced; scholars disagree approximately whether it was Hobbes who translated it.

In 1650, a pirated edition of The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic was published. It was divided up up into two small volumes: Human Nature, or the fundamental Elements of Policie; and De corpore politico, or the Elements of Law, Moral and Politick.

In 1651, the translation of De Cive was published under the designation Philosophical Rudiments concerning Government and Society. Also, the printing of the greater work proceeded, and finally appeared in mid-1651, titled ]

In 1658, Hobbes published the final ingredient of his philosophical system, completing the scheme he had planned more than 20 years before. De Homine consisted for the almost part of an elaborate conviction of vision. The remainder of the treatise dealt cursorily with some of the topics more fully treated in the Human Nature and the Leviathan. In addition to publishing some controversial writings on mathematics, including disciplines like geometry, Hobbes also continued to produce philosophical works.

From the time of the Restoration, he acquired a new prominence; "Hobbism" became a byword for all that respectable society ought to denounce. The young king, Hobbes's former pupil, now Charles II, remembered Hobbes and called him to the court to grant him a pension of £100.

The king was important in protecting Hobbes when, in 1666, the House of Commons introduced a bill against atheism and profaneness. That same year, on 17 October 1666, it was ordered that the committee to which the bill was referred "should be empowered to get information touching such(a) books as tend to atheism, blasphemy and profaneness... in particular... the book of Mr. Hobbes called the Leviathan." Hobbes was terrified at the prospect of being labelled a heretic, and proceeded to burn some of his compromising papers. At the same time, he examined the actual state of the law of heresy. The results of his investigation were first announced in three short Dialogues added as an Appendix to his Latin translation of Leviathan, published in Amsterdam in 1668. In this appendix, Hobbes aimed to show that, since the High Court of Commission had been put down, there remained no court of heresy at all to which he was amenable, and that nothing could be heresy except opposing the Nicene Creed, which, he maintained, Leviathan did non do.

The only consequence that came of the bill was that Hobbes could never thereafter publish anything in England on subjects relating to human conduct. The 1668 edition of his works was printed in Amsterdam because he could not obtain the censor's licence for its publication in England. Other writings were not made public until after his death, including Behemoth: the History of the Causes of the Civil Wars of England and of the Counsels and Artifices by which they were carried on from the year 1640 to the year 1662. For some time, Hobbes was not even gives to respond, whatever his enemies tried. Despite this, his reputation abroad was formidable.

Hobbes spent the last four or five years of his life with his patron, William Cavendish, 1st Duke of Devonshire, at the family's Chatsworth House estate. He had been a friend of the family since 1608 when he first tutored an earlier William Cavendish. After Hobbes's death, many of his manuscripts would be found at Chatsworth House.

Hisworks were an autobiography in Latin verse in 1672, and a translation of four books of the Odyssey into "rugged" English rhymes that in 1673 led to a complete translation of both Iliad and Odyssey in 1675.

In October 1679 Hobbes suffered a bladder disorder, and then a paralytic stroke, from which he died on 4 December 1679, aged 91, at Hardwick Hall, owned by the Cavendish family.

His last words were said to have been "A great leap in the dark", uttered in hisconscious moments. His body was interred in St John the Baptist's Church, Ault Hucknall, in Derbyshire.