Thomas Hobbes & David Hume

Thomas Hobbes
&
David Hume
Thomas Hobbes
– Thomas Hobbes (1588 - 1679) was an English philosopher of the Age of Reason.
His famous 1651 book "Leviathan" and his social contract theory, developed
during the tumultuous times around the English Civil War, established the
foundation for most of Western Political Philosophy.
– Thomas Hobbes was born prematurely in Malmesbury, Wiltshire, England on 5
April 1588. His father, also Thomas, was the vicar of Charlton and Westport, but
he abandoned his three children to the care of his older brother, Francis
Hobbes, and fleed to London after an altercation outside his own church.
Nothing is known of his mother.
A closet Atheist. No natural source of authority
– Hobbes was not (as many have charged) an atheist, but he had a boundless
contempt for Scholastic philosophy and the speculations of the Scholastics, (with
their combinations of Christian theology and Aristotelian Metaphysics), and he was
insistent that theological disputes should be kept out of politics. He also adopted a
strongly Materialist metaphysics, which made it difficult to account for God's
existence as a spiritual entity. He claimed there is no natural source of authority to
order our lives, and that human judgment is inherently unreliable, and therefore
needs to be guided.
– It was written during the English Civil War of 1642 - 1651, and much of the
book is occupied with demonstrating the necessity of a strong central
authority and the avoidance of the evils of discord and civil war. It built on
the earlier "Elements of Law" of 1640, (which was initially an attempt to
provide arguments supporting the King against his challengers), and
particularly on his "De Cive" of 1642.
Needs to create government to escape from
barbarism
– He argued that the human body is like a machine, and that political
organization ("commonwealth") is like an artificial human being. Beginning
from this mechanistic understanding of human beings and the passions,
Hobbes postulated what life would be like without government, a condition
which he called the "state of nature" and which he argued inevitably leads to
conflict and lives that are "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short". In order to
escape this state of war and insecurity, men in the state of nature accede to a
"social contract" and establish a civil society.
Individuals must sacrifice their natural rights to
the ruler
– Thus, all individuals in that society cede their natural rights for the sake
of protection, and any abuses of power by this authority must be
accepted as the price of peace (although in severe cases of abuse,
rebellion is to be expected).
Favors absolute power and dictators
– In particular, he rejected the doctrine of separation of powers,

arguing that the sovereign must control civil, military, judicial
and ecclesiastical powers, which some have seen as a
justification for authoritarianism and even Totalitarianism.
Just obey to an authority
– Thus, Hobbes' ethical views were based on the premise that what we
ought to do depends greatly on the situation in which we find
ourselves: where political authority is lacking (as in his famous natural
condition of mankind), our fundamental right is self-preservation (to
save our skins by whatever means we think fit); where political
authority exists, however, our duty is merely to obey those in power.
David Hume
– David Hume (1711 - 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, economist and historian of the Age
of Enlightenment. He was an important figure in the Scottish Enlightenment and, along
with John Locke and Bishop George Berkeley, one of the three main figureheads of the
influential British Empiricism movement.
– He was a fierce opponent of the Rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz and Spinoza, as well as
an atheist and a skeptic. He has come to be considered as one of the most important
British philosophers of all time, and he was a huge influence on later philosophers, from
Immanuel Kant and Arthur Schopenhauer to the Logical Positivists and Analytic
Philosophers of the 20th Century, as well as on intellectuals in other fields (including
Albert Einstein, who claimed to have been inspired by Hume's skepticism of the
established order).
– Hume was born on 26 April 1711 in a tenement on the Lawnmarket in
Edinburgh, Scotland. His father was Joseph Home (an advocate or
barrister of Chirnside, Berwickshire, Scotland), and the aristocrat
Katherine Lady Falconer. He changed his name to Hume in 1734 because
the English had difficulty pronouncing "Home" in the Scottish manner.
Hume is an Empiricist
– As an Empiricist, Hume was always concerned with going back to
experience and observation, and this led him to touch on some difficult
ideas in what would later become known as the Philosophy of Language.
– For instance, he was convinced that for a word to mean anything at all, it
had to relate to a specific idea, and for an idea to have real content it had
to be derived from real experience. If no such underlying experience can
be found, therefore, the word effectively has no meaning.
2 kinds of knowledge
– He argued that all of human knowledge can be divided into two categories:
– 1. original
– Came from the senses out from the natural world
2. Secondary
-processed original knowledge or deducted by our brain.
Morality and desire over reason
– He asserted that “reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions, and
can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them”. Thus, he
severely circumscribed reason's role in the production of action, and stressed
that desires are necessary for motivation, and this view on human motivation
and action formed the cornerstone of his ethical theory.
– His theory of Ethics, sometimes described as sentimentalism, has helped to
inspire various forms of non-cognitivist and moral nihilist ethical theories
including emotivism, ethical expressivism, quasi-realism, error theory, etc.
Hume is irreligious
– Hume argued that it is impossible to deduce the existence of God from the existence of the
world because causes cannot be determined from effects. Although he left open the theoretical
possibility of miracles (which may be defined as singular events that differ from the established
laws of Nature), he cautioned that they should only be believed if it were less likely that the
testimony was false than that a miracle did in fact occur, and offered various arguments against
this ever having actually happened in history.
– Hume said that there was no such thing as a necessary being, and that anything that could be
conceived of as existent could just as easily be conceived of as non-existent.
Not a total democratic person
– He supported freedom of the press; he was sympathetic to elected representation and democracy
(when suitably constrained); he believed that private property was not a natural right (as John Locke
held), but that it was justified because resources are limited; he was optimistic about social progress
arising from the economic development that comes with the expansion of trade; and he counseled
strongly against revolution and resistance to governments except in cases of the most egregious
tyranny.
– Hume believed in the need for an unequal distribution of property, on the grounds that perfect
equality would destroy the ideas of thrift and industry, and thus ultimately lead to impoverishment.
He was among the first to develop the concept of automatic price-specie flow, and proposed a theory
of beneficial inflation, which was later to be developed by John Maynard Keynes (1883 - 1946).
Morality can only be determined on
how it affect others
– Individual’s action can only be determined to be
moral or not on how it affects others.

Thomas Hobbes & David Hume

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thomas Hobbes & David Hume

Uploaded by

Document Information

Original Description:

Original Title

Copyright

Available Formats

Share this document

Share or Embed Document

Sharing Options

Did you find this document useful?

Is this content inappropriate?

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thomas Hobbes & David Hume

Uploaded by

Copyright:

Available Formats

Thomas Hobbes

– In particular, he rejected the doctrine of separation of powers,

You might also like