1 00:00:10,950 --> 00:00:21,260 OK. Now we come to another great figure, Thomas Hobbs, much less celebrated in the 17th century, rather notorious. 2 00:00:21,260 --> 00:00:30,630 In fact, he was called the monster of Malmsbury. His various works assigned Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury. 3 00:00:30,630 --> 00:00:40,050 Hobbs, incidentally, is claimed as an alumnus by Hertford College because he attended more than Hall, which was an earlier name of the college. 4 00:00:40,050 --> 00:00:49,570 Well, hobs took this mechanist view of nature to its extreme. 5 00:00:49,570 --> 00:00:56,140 He said, yes, material substance does work in more or less the way that Descartes thought. 6 00:00:56,140 --> 00:01:02,330 But that's all there is. The only thing there is in nature is physical stuff. 7 00:01:02,330 --> 00:01:11,240 There is no immaterial substance at all. So he denied immaterial substance. 8 00:01:11,240 --> 00:01:16,280 He denied witchcraft. He was denied the existence of magic. 9 00:01:16,280 --> 00:01:25,730 That kind of thing. He denied that we should rely on religious revelation. 10 00:01:25,730 --> 00:01:31,210 Instead, he wanted to say that the world was basically a mechanical system. 11 00:01:31,210 --> 00:01:38,890 And he asserted universal determinism accordingly. Everything act in accordance with deterministic physical laws. 12 00:01:38,890 --> 00:01:49,520 So one thing follows another by a causal pattern in which every detail is inevitably determined by what went before. 13 00:01:49,520 --> 00:01:59,780 Famously, he also said that one should obey a sovereign in everything, both in religion and morals, 14 00:01:59,780 --> 00:02:05,540 and the work he's most famous for is not a work in theoretical philosophy. It's a work in political philosophy. 15 00:02:05,540 --> 00:02:13,370 Leviathan, 16 51. This is a very famous front frontispiece of Leviathan. 16 00:02:13,370 --> 00:02:22,940 So Hobbs is particularly notorious for enunciating its very pessimistic view of human nature. 17 00:02:22,940 --> 00:02:28,110 Human nature left to itself is a war of all against all. 18 00:02:28,110 --> 00:02:38,610 We're all desperately striving for what we can get. So the life of man is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short. 19 00:02:38,610 --> 00:02:42,090 How do we avoid that? Well, according to Hobs political theory, 20 00:02:42,090 --> 00:02:46,530 the only way of avoiding it is for us to club together and agree to erect an 21 00:02:46,530 --> 00:02:54,130 absolute sovereign who will have power over us and whose role is to keep the peace. 22 00:02:54,130 --> 00:03:01,480 It helps to understand Hobbs's political theory if you realise that he was around during the English Civil War. 23 00:03:01,480 --> 00:03:08,200 He saw the avoidance of civil war as the ultimate thing, the thing more important than anything else. 24 00:03:08,200 --> 00:03:15,890 And in order to avoid that civil war, it was worth subjecting oneself to absolute sovereignty. 25 00:03:15,890 --> 00:03:24,230 Hobbs is still very much studied today amongst political theorists. He's left a legacy in things like game theory, a general trap. 26 00:03:24,230 --> 00:03:34,360 He is notable because he attempts to understand society as a system which has grown out of the solution of practical problems. 27 00:03:34,360 --> 00:03:38,470 He doesn't want to appeal to divine revelation. Why not? 28 00:03:38,470 --> 00:03:46,310 Because as we saw last time, different interpretations of divine revelation can lead to people going around killing each other. 29 00:03:46,310 --> 00:03:52,700 He doesn't want to appeal to any sort of God given authority of a king for the same reason. 30 00:03:52,700 --> 00:04:02,310 Very practical. He wants to establish political authority on purely naturalistic foundations. 31 00:04:02,310 --> 00:04:11,030 So as I've said, Hobbs's a materialist and this is the thing more than anything that made him notorious at the time. 32 00:04:11,030 --> 00:04:18,110 So Descartes, remember, had distinguished distinguish between material and immaterial substance. 33 00:04:18,110 --> 00:04:25,250 The physical world is made of stuff whose essence is pure extension. 34 00:04:25,250 --> 00:04:35,780 But does that mean there's no place for mind? No. Descartes thought that mind, whose essence is thinking, is made of immaterial substance. 35 00:04:35,780 --> 00:04:38,060 But Hobbs would have none of that. 36 00:04:38,060 --> 00:04:49,700 So he gives this example of abuses of words when men make a name with two names whose signification is are contradictory and inconsistent. 37 00:04:49,700 --> 00:05:00,680 The result is but insignificant sounds as this name and incorporeal body, or which is all one, an incorporeal substance. 38 00:05:00,680 --> 00:05:10,550 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. 39 00:05:10,550 --> 00:05:17,190 The combination of body and it incorporeal. 40 00:05:17,190 --> 00:05:25,840 All right, corporeal means, bodily material. So he's simply saying an incorporeal body is a contradiction in terms. 41 00:05:25,840 --> 00:05:37,390 And so when Descartes tries to appeal to the idea of an immaterial substance as making room for mind hobs just denies it. 42 00:05:37,390 --> 00:05:49,900 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? 43 00:05:49,900 --> 00:05:55,480 Well, you might think not. Many people think not. But Hobbs was a compatible ist. 44 00:05:55,480 --> 00:06:01,850 He thought freewill and determinism are compatible. 45 00:06:01,850 --> 00:06:06,480 And he achieves that by defining freedom in an appropriate way. 46 00:06:06,480 --> 00:06:12,270 Liberty or freedom signify properly the absence of opposition by opposition. 47 00:06:12,270 --> 00:06:16,170 I mean external impediments of motion. A free man. 48 00:06:16,170 --> 00:06:24,420 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? 49 00:06:24,420 --> 00:06:30,540 So I suppose there's something I want to do. I want to take a drink of water, for example. 50 00:06:30,540 --> 00:06:39,510 Well, am I hindered in doing so? No, I'm able to do it, so I'm free. 51 00:06:39,510 --> 00:06:45,150 The fact that my wanting that and all the movements of my body and achieving it were 52 00:06:45,150 --> 00:06:51,960 physically determined doesn't in any way prevent my being free according to Hobbs definition. 53 00:06:51,960 --> 00:06:57,700 So Hobbs is the first classic compatable list. We'll be seeing that later when we come to discuss Will. 54 00:06:57,700 --> 00:07:13,030 A very, very influential position. Now, materialism is obviously rather difficult, difficult to reconcile with traditional religious beliefs. 55 00:07:13,030 --> 00:07:17,620 Most people do not think of God and the Angels as being material pubs. 56 00:07:17,620 --> 00:07:26,040 Did. Well, seems to have done. Clearly, there's a major problem with immortality. 57 00:07:26,040 --> 00:07:32,430 If you believe that everything is material, we know what happens to material bodies after people die. 58 00:07:32,430 --> 00:07:40,530 If the material body is all there is, it's hard to see how there can be any afterlife, let alone immortality. 59 00:07:40,530 --> 00:07:46,620 So it's not surprising that many at the time took Hobbs to be an atheist in sixteen sixty six, 60 00:07:46,620 --> 00:07:53,580 the English parliament cited his Athie ism as the probable cause of the plague and the fire of London. 61 00:07:53,580 --> 00:08:04,590 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. 62 00:08:04,590 --> 00:08:11,820 In 16 83, his books were publicly burned in Oxford because of their damnable doctrines false, 63 00:08:11,820 --> 00:08:20,740 seditious and even pious, and most of them also heretical and blasphemous and destructive of all government. 64 00:08:20,740 --> 00:08:25,550 A rather amusing episode in Cambridge. 65 00:08:25,550 --> 00:08:32,420 Well, not amusing for Daniel Scargill, who got expelled from his fellowship for being a hobbyist. 66 00:08:32,420 --> 00:08:40,600 In other words, a follower of hobs. He tried to get it back by recanting, by saying, OK, I fess up. 67 00:08:40,600 --> 00:08:46,780 I was a hobbyist, but I'm not anymore. And his recantation is really rather funny. 68 00:08:46,780 --> 00:08:52,410 I have lately vented and publicly asserted diverse, wicked, blasphemous and atheistic. 69 00:08:52,410 --> 00:09:02,980 All positions professing that I glawe into began hobbyist and an atheist agreeably under which principles I have lived in great licentiousness, 70 00:09:02,980 --> 00:09:08,590 swearing rashly, drinking, intemperately, corrupting others. 71 00:09:08,590 --> 00:09:15,700 So the assumption at the time, of course, was that if you were an atheist, there was nothing to make you moral morality. 72 00:09:15,700 --> 00:09:25,240 Most people assumed comes from God. And moreover, the safeguarded morality is punishment in an afterlife for those who are wicked. 73 00:09:25,240 --> 00:09:30,550 So most people at the time tended to assume that if you were an atheist, you were bound to be wicked. 74 00:09:30,550 --> 00:09:37,060 And here Daniel Scargill was going along with that idea. 75 00:09:37,060 --> 00:09:43,570 So Hobbs was very much a bogey man and he remained a bogey man for a long time. 76 00:09:43,570 --> 00:09:49,970 Even David Hume, who was influenced. Quite a lot by Hobbs in various ways. 77 00:09:49,970 --> 00:09:56,510 Hardly mentions him. If you were influenced by hobs, you didn't say so. 78 00:09:56,510 --> 00:10:04,610 Hobs was only to be mentioned in order to be refuted, hence monster of Malmsbury. 79 00:10:04,610 --> 00:10:07,100 So how was he to be refuted? 80 00:10:07,100 --> 00:10:16,280 Well, the main argument that was used against materialism was to insist that there were certain things that matter could not do. 81 00:10:16,280 --> 00:10:22,250 Remember the key role of inertia? Aristotle thought that things have natural desires. 82 00:10:22,250 --> 00:10:27,950 Strivings that lead them to do certain things like striving to reach the centre of the universe. 83 00:10:27,950 --> 00:10:33,140 Galileo and Descartes replaced that with the idea of inertia. Matter is passive. 84 00:10:33,140 --> 00:10:38,240 It just keeps going in the same direction, at the same speed until it's acted upon by force. 85 00:10:38,240 --> 00:10:48,890 So remember the sledge moving over flat ice? What requires explanation is not why it keeps going, but why it stops. 86 00:10:48,890 --> 00:10:58,070 Well, if matter is necessarily passive and that seemed very much to be supported by the physical theory, then activity cannot come from matter. 87 00:10:58,070 --> 00:11:03,680 Activity must come from mind. So there must be something other than matter. 88 00:11:03,680 --> 00:11:10,630 And in particular, mental activity thought seems entirely beyond the capacity of matter. 89 00:11:10,630 --> 00:11:16,060 Matter. Well, that's just bits of stuff in motion. Bashing into each other and so forth. 90 00:11:16,060 --> 00:11:20,530 How can that give rise to thought? And this argument was a very popular one. 91 00:11:20,530 --> 00:11:23,380 I mean, look at those dates. And these are just the big figures. OK. 92 00:11:23,380 --> 00:11:35,488 There were dozens of people writing against materialism by appeal to this sort of argument.