OK. Now we come to another great figure, Thomas Hobbs, much less celebrated in the 17th century, rather notorious.
In fact, he was called the monster of Malmsbury. His various works assigned Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury.
Hobbs, incidentally, is claimed as an alumnus by Hertford College because he attended more than Hall, which was an earlier name of the college.
Well, hobs took this mechanist view of nature to its extreme.
He said, yes, material substance does work in more or less the way that Descartes thought.
But that's all there is. The only thing there is in nature is physical stuff.
There is no immaterial substance at all. So he denied immaterial substance.
He denied witchcraft. He was denied the existence of magic.
That kind of thing. He denied that we should rely on religious revelation.
Instead, he wanted to say that the world was basically a mechanical system.
And he asserted universal determinism accordingly. Everything act in accordance with deterministic physical laws.
So one thing follows another by a causal pattern in which every detail is inevitably determined by what went before.
Famously, he also said that one should obey a sovereign in everything, both in religion and morals,
and the work he's most famous for is not a work in theoretical philosophy. It's a work in political philosophy.
Leviathan, 16 51. This is a very famous front frontispiece of Leviathan.
So Hobbs is particularly notorious for enunciating its very pessimistic view of human nature.
Human nature left to itself is a war of all against all.
We're all desperately striving for what we can get. So the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short.
How do we avoid that? Well, according to Hobs political theory,
the only way of avoiding it is for us to club together and agree to erect an
absolute sovereign who will have power over us and whose role is to keep the peace.
It helps to understand Hobbs's political theory if you realise that he was around during the English Civil War.
He saw the avoidance of civil war as the ultimate thing, the thing more important than anything else.
And in order to avoid that civil war, it was worth subjecting oneself to absolute sovereignty.
Hobbs is still very much studied today amongst political theorists. He's left a legacy in things like game theory, a general trap.
He is notable because he attempts to understand society as a system which has grown out of the solution of practical problems.
He doesn't want to appeal to divine revelation. Why not?
Because as we saw last time, different interpretations of divine revelation can lead to people going around killing each other.
He doesn't want to appeal to any sort of God given authority of a king for the same reason.
Very practical. He wants to establish political authority on purely naturalistic foundations.
So as I've said, Hobbs's a materialist and this is the thing more than anything that made him notorious at the time.
So Descartes, remember, had distinguished distinguish between material and immaterial substance.
The physical world is made of stuff whose essence is pure extension.
But does that mean there's no place for mind? No. Descartes thought that mind, whose essence is thinking, is made of immaterial substance.
But Hobbs would have none of that.
So he gives this example of abuses of words when men make a name with two names whose signification is are contradictory and inconsistent.
The result is but insignificant sounds as this name and incorporeal body, or which is all one, an incorporeal substance.
Now, you might think Hobbs's is having a bit of a joke at Descartes expense here because he's giving an example of an abuse of words.
The combination of body and it incorporeal.
All right, corporeal means, bodily material. So he's simply saying an incorporeal body is a contradiction in terms.
And so when Descartes tries to appeal to the idea of an immaterial substance as making room for mind hobs just denies it.
What about free will? If we are essentially material, if everything we do is determined by material causation, does that leave any room for freedom?
Well, you might think not. Many people think not. But Hobbs was a compatible ist.
He thought freewill and determinism are compatible.
And he achieves that by defining freedom in an appropriate way.
Liberty or freedom signify properly the absence of opposition by opposition.
I mean external impediments of motion. A free man.
Is he that in those things, which by his strength and wit, he is able to do, is not hindered to do what he has a will to do?
So I suppose there's something I want to do. I want to take a drink of water, for example.
Well, am I hindered in doing so? No, I'm able to do it, so I'm free.
The fact that my wanting that and all the movements of my body and achieving it were
physically determined doesn't in any way prevent my being free according to Hobbs definition.
So Hobbs is the first classic compatable list. We'll be seeing that later when we come to discuss Will.
A very, very influential position. Now, materialism is obviously rather difficult, difficult to reconcile with traditional religious beliefs.
Most people do not think of God and the Angels as being material pubs.
Did. Well, seems to have done. Clearly, there's a major problem with immortality.
If you believe that everything is material, we know what happens to material bodies after people die.
If the material body is all there is, it's hard to see how there can be any afterlife, let alone immortality.
So it's not surprising that many at the time took Hobbs to be an atheist in sixteen sixty six,
the English parliament cited his Athie ism as the probable cause of the plague and the fire of London.
So there was a debate in parliament as to whether he should be arrested and punished for having been the cause of this divine displeasure.
In 16 83, his books were publicly burned in Oxford because of their damnable doctrines false,
seditious and even pious, and most of them also heretical and blasphemous and destructive of all government.
A rather amusing episode in Cambridge.
Well, not amusing for Daniel Scargill, who got expelled from his fellowship for being a hobbyist.
In other words, a follower of hobs. He tried to get it back by recanting, by saying, OK, I fess up.
I was a hobbyist, but I'm not anymore. And his recantation is really rather funny.
I have lately vented and publicly asserted diverse, wicked, blasphemous and atheistic.
All positions professing that I glawe into began hobbyist and an atheist agreeably under which principles I have lived in great licentiousness,
swearing rashly, drinking, intemperately, corrupting others.
So the assumption at the time, of course, was that if you were an atheist, there was nothing to make you moral morality.
Most people assumed comes from God. And moreover, the safeguarded morality is punishment in an afterlife for those who are wicked.
So most people at the time tended to assume that if you were an atheist, you were bound to be wicked.
And here Daniel Scargill was going along with that idea.
So Hobbs was very much a bogey man and he remained a bogey man for a long time.
Even David Hume, who was influenced. Quite a lot by Hobbs in various ways.
Hardly mentions him. If you were influenced by hobs, you didn't say so.
Hobs was only to be mentioned in order to be refuted, hence monster of Malmsbury.
So how was he to be refuted?
Well, the main argument that was used against materialism was to insist that there were certain things that matter could not do.
Remember the key role of inertia? Aristotle thought that things have natural desires.
Strivings that lead them to do certain things like striving to reach the centre of the universe.
Galileo and Descartes replaced that with the idea of inertia. Matter is passive.
It just keeps going in the same direction, at the same speed until it's acted upon by force.
So remember the sledge moving over flat ice? What requires explanation is not why it keeps going, but why it stops.
Well, if matter is necessarily passive and that seemed very much to be supported by the physical theory, then activity cannot come from matter.
Activity must come from mind. So there must be something other than matter.
And in particular, mental activity thought seems entirely beyond the capacity of matter.
Matter. Well, that's just bits of stuff in motion. Bashing into each other and so forth.
How can that give rise to thought? And this argument was a very popular one.
I mean, look at those dates. And these are just the big figures. OK.
There were dozens of people writing against materialism by appeal to this sort of argument.