When Thomas Hobbes wrote that " the Papacy is no other than the ghost of the deceased Roman Empire sitting crowned upon the grave thereof ", he was promulgating an enormously important truth.

An early professed empiricist, Thomas Hobbes, known as an eccentric denizen of the court of Charles II of England ( an " old bear "), published in 1651 Leviathan, a political treatise written during the English civil war, containing an early manifesto in English of rationalism.

Entering the University of Leiden he took his degree in philosophy in 1689, with a dissertation De distinctione mentis a corpore ( on the difference of the mind from the body ), in which he attacked the doctrines of Epicurus, Thomas Hobbes and Spinoza.

Later, when Watterson was creating names for the characters in his comic strip, he allegedly decided upon Calvin ( after the Protestant reformer John Calvin ) and Hobbes ( after the social philosopher Thomas Hobbes ) as a " tip of the hat " to the political science department at Kenyon.

" There seems to be little doubt that this could only be John Calvin and Thomas Hobbes, respectively.

This idea was already rejected as untenable by John Calvin ( 1509 – 1564 ), and by the time of Thomas Hobbes ( 1588 – 1679 ) it was recognised that the book must have been written much later than the period it depicted.

Hedonism, for example, teaches that this feeling is pleasure — either one's own, as in egoism ( the 17th-century English philosopher Thomas Hobbes ), or everyone's, as in universalistic hedonism, or utilitarianism ( the 19th-century English philosophers Jeremy Bentham, John Stuart Mill, and Henry Sidgwick ), with its formula of the " greatest pleasure of the greatest number.

Classical liberals agreed with Thomas Hobbes that government had been created by individuals to protect themselves from one another.

Hayek conceded that the national labels did not exactly correspond to those belonging to each tradition: Hayek saw the Frenchmen Montesquieu, Constant and Tocqueville as belonging to the " British tradition " and the British Thomas Hobbes, Priestley, Richard Price and Thomas Paine as belonging to the " French tradition ".

* 1679 – Thomas Hobbes, English philosopher ( b. 1588 )

Thomas Hobbes – a 17th century deist and important influence on subsequent deists – used the cosmological argument for the existence of God at several places in his writings.

Other philosophers, such as Thomas Hobbes and David Gauthier, have argued that the conflicts which arise when people each pursue their own ends can be resolved for the best of each individual only if they all voluntarily forgo some of their aims — that is, one's self-interest is often best pursued by allowing others to pursue their self-interest as well so that liberty is equal among individuals.

* Thomas Hobbes

* Hobbes, Thomas, 1968, Leviathan, C. B. Macpherson ( ed.

Philosophers associated with empiricism include Aristotle, Alhazen, Avicenna, Ibn Tufail, Robert Grosseteste, William of Ockham, Francis Bacon, Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle, John Locke, George Berkeley, David Hume, Leopold von Ranke, John Stuart Mill, and Karl Popper.

Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in the next generation, are often also described as an empiricist and a rationalist respectively.

When was a " base sycophant " loved and honoured by piety such as that of Herbert, Tennison, and Rawley, by noble spirits like Hobbes, Ben Jonson, and Selden, or followed to the grave, and beyond it, with devoted affection such as that of Sir Thomas Meautys.

Aubrey has been criticised for his evident credulousness in this and other works ; on the other hand, he knew Thomas Hobbes, Bacon's fellow-philosopher and friend.

A moral philosopher who produced alternatives to the ideas of Thomas Hobbes, one of his major contributions to world thought was the utilitarian and consequentialist principle that virtue is that which provides, in his words, " the greatest happiness for the greatest numbers ".

# REDIRECT Thomas Hobbes

While it was once thought that Locke wrote the Treatises to defend the Glorious Revolution of 1688, recent scholarship has shown that the work was composed well before this date, and it is now viewed as a more general argument against absolute monarchy ( particularly as espoused by Robert Filmer and Thomas Hobbes ) and for individual consent as the basis of political legitimacy.

Thomas Hobbes was an English Age of Enlightenment | Enlightenment scholar

In his Leviathan of 1651, Thomas Hobbes referred to it as the English Translation made in the beginning of the Reign of King James.

* 1776 – Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense.

* 1775 – An anonymous writer, thought by some to be Thomas Paine, publishes " African Slavery in America ", the first article in the American colonies calling for the emancipation of slaves and the abolition of slavery.

* Thomas Mann publishes Death in Venice

* January 3 – Harper's Weekly publishes Thomas Nast's first drawing of the modern Santa Claus ( although Santa existed previously ).

* Thomas Hardy anonymously publishes his romantic novel Under the Greenwood Tree.

* November 7 – Harper's Weekly publishes a cartoon by Thomas Nast which is the first use of an elephant as a symbol for the Republican Party.

* Thomas Wedgwood publishes an account of his experiments in photography, along with Humphry Davy.

* Sir Isaac Newton's Method of Fluxions ( 1671 ), describing his method of differential calculus, is first published ( posthumously ) and Thomas Bayes publishes a defense of its logical foundations ( anonymously ).

* January 10: Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense

* Thomas More publishes Utopia.

* Paolo Cortese publishes De Cardinalatu, a manual for cardinals, including advice on palatial architecture – which inspires Thomas Wolsey in his construction work at Hampton Court Palace.

* 1776 – Thomas Paine publishes Common Sense ( January 10 )

* Thomas Corneille publishes his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses into the French language.

* Stationer Thomas Marsh publishes Seneca's Tragedies in English, a collected edition of ten dramas written by Seneca the Younger ( or attributed to him ), translated by Jasper Heywood, John Studley, Alexander Neville, Thomas Newton, and Thomas Nuce.

* Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring publishes his description of Pterodactylus which he names Ornithocephalus antiquus.

* Thomas Blundeville publishes The Theoriques of the Seuen Planets, assisted by Lancelot Browne.

* Thomas Southwood Smith publishes the standard textbook A Treatise on Fever in London.

Thomas Pennant publishes Arctic Zoology.

* Thomas Robert Malthus publishes the first edition of An Essay on the Principle of Population ( anonymously ) in London.

* Samuel Thomas von Sömmerring publishes Tabula sceleti feminini in Frankfurt am Main, the first accurate representation of the female skeleton.

* Thomas Bewick publishes the first volume of his History of British Birds.

* Dr Thomas Percival of Manchester publishes his Code of Medical Ethics, coining the expression medical ethics.