Hobbes (Calvin and Hobbes)

Hobbes is one of the two main characters in the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson. He is Calvin's stuffed tiger and best friend, and is depicted with two distinct identities.

Hobbes' personality

Hobbes is seen in two differentiating perspectives. Calvin perceives him as a live tiger and a best friend. To everybody else, he's a stuffed tiger.

Hobbes is often shown to be smarter and wiser than Calvin when he is perceived as a real tiger. He is seen reading more often than his owner and tries to be the voice of reason when Calvin tries to perform a risky stunt or engage in a dubious scheme. Hobbes' advice mostly has no effect on Calvin, who usually ignores Hobbes's reasoning and winds up getting in trouble for his actions. Because of this, some fans say that Hobbes represents Calvin's conscience. However, Hobbes is shown to be terrible at math, quite possibly worse than Calvin himself.

Hobbes is named after Thomas Hobbes, a philosopher who at times had a poor outlook on life and human nature. When Hobbes is shown to be alive, he is proud of his species and glad not to be a human, showing that when Hobbes comes to life, he too believes he is a real tiger.

Thomas Hobbes

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (/hɒbz/; 5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy.

Though on rational grounds a champion of absolutism for the sovereign, Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.

He was one of the founders of modern political philosophy and political science. His understanding of humans as being matter and motion, obeying the same physical laws as other matter and motion, remains influential; and his account of human nature as self-interested cooperation, and of political communities as being based upon a "social contract" remains one of the major topics of political philosophy.

Thomas Hobbes (priest)

Thomas Hobbes was Dean of Exeter during 1509.

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