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.

Hobbes said :" The Latines called Accounts of mony Rationes ... and thence it seems to proceed that they extended the word Ratio, to the faculty of Reckoning in all other things .... When a man reasoneth hee does nothing else but conceive a summe totall ... For Reason ... is nothing but Reckoning ... of the consequences of generall names agreed upon, for the marking and signifying of our thoughts ...."

In Hobbes reasoning is the right process of drawing conclusions from definitions ( the " names agreed upon ").

If nature cannot err, then there are no paradoxes in it ; to Hobbes, the paradox is a form of the absurd, which is inconsistency: " Natural sense and imagination, are not subject to absurdity " and " For error is but a deception ...

" The words " Is, or Bee, or Are, and the like " add no meaning to an argument nor do derived words such as " Entity, Essence, Essentially, Essentiality ", which " are the names of nothing " but are mere " Signes " connecting " one name or attribute to another: as when we say, A man, is, a living body, wee mean not that the Man is one thing, the Living Body another, and the Is, or Being another: but that the Man, and the Living Body, is the same thing ;...." " Metaphysiques ," Hobbes says, is " far from the possibility of being understood " and is " repugnant to naturall Reason.

Being to Hobbes ( and the other empiricists ) is the physical universe: The world, ( I mean ... the Universe, that is, the whole masse of all things that are ) is corporeall, that is to say, Body ; and hath the dimension of magnitude, namely, Length, Bredth and Depth: also every part of Body, is likewise Body ... and consequently every part of the Universe is Body, and that which is not Body, is no part of the Universe: and because the Universe is all, that which is no part of it is nothing ; and consequently no where.

Hobbes ' view is representative of his tradition.

William " Bill " Boyd Watterson II ( born July 5, 1958 ) is an American cartoonist and the author of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes, which was syndicated from 1985 to 1995.

In " The Complete Calvin And Hobbes ," Watterson does not name the inspiration for Calvin's character, but he does say Calvin is named for " a 16th-century theologian who believed in predestination ," and Hobbes for " a 17th-century philosopher with a dim view of human nature.

17th-century philosophy is dominated by the need to organize philosophy on rational, skeptical, logical and axiomatic grounds, such as the work of René Descartes, Blaise Pascal, and Thomas Hobbes.

One of the few exceptions is Detective Hobbes, which has turned Azazel's ire at the Detective for capturing him into an obsession.

The next day, Hobbes takes Sam to Gretta's where they consult several ancient texts and discover that Azazel's ability to transfer from body to body in spirit form has a finite range of about one-sixth of a mile and must be performed within a relatively short time period.

Both Hobbes and Bodin thought they were defending the power of kings, not advocating democracy, but their arguments about the nature of sovereignty were fiercely resisted by more traditional defenders of the power of kings, like Sir Robert Filmer in England, who thought that such defenses ultimately opened the way to more democratic claims.

The theory claims to rely upon an ancient tradition of thought which includes writers such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, and Hobbes.

Strauss claims that the supposed egoism of Hobbes ' natural law and the ostensible altruism of Locke's can be reduced to an identical moral framework, one in which people are to treat others as others treat them, to be selfless when others are selfless, selfish when others are selfish.

He also asserted that the absence of any reference to Hobbes, the questionable utility of refuting Hobbes when he was a non-issue in the most immediate debates, and the fact that Locke claims to have never read Hobbes or Spinoza, " those justly-decried names ," harms any interpretation that interprets Locke as in any way responding to Hobbes.

Whereas Hobbes speaks of the misery of the State of Nature more directly, Locke waits until Chapter IX to describe the state of nature as one that ' however free, is full of continual dangers.

Classical republicanism became extremely popular in the Classicism and Enlightenment, playing a central role in the thought of political philosophy since Hobbes, through John Locke, Giambattista Vico, Montesquieu, Rousseau, until Kant.

) In some of the traditional schools, such as those of the post-1688 English or Americans ( many of the writings of the American Founding Fathers, but especially The Federalist ) and their Dutch predecessors ( see Kossmann, E. H. Political Thought in the Dutch Republic, 2004 ) ontology proper is deemed beyond the scope of legal thought, in accord with the modern distinction between society and state ( which some consider based in the distinction the Romans made between themselves and their Italian allies, the socii, but not given the theoretical articulation we recognize today until emphasized by Thomas Hobbes ' Leviathan.

Eventually Hobbes tracks down the killer and confronts him alone, where the man makes a startling claim: he is the same killer Hobbes sentenced to death, but not Edgar Reese ; rather, he is the demon Azazel, and was possessing Reese's body during the murders.

In addition to systematic work in moral theory, Gauthier's main philosophical interests are in the history of political philosophy, with special attention to Hobbes and Rousseau, and in the theory of practical rationality, where he begins from an attempt to understand economic rationality, rather than from Kantian or Aristotelian antecedents.

Hobbes begins his treatise on politics with an account of human nature.

Hobbes thus begins by establishing that we cannot infallibly know another's personal word to be divine revelation:

In Natural Right and History Strauss begins with a critique of Max Weber's epistemology, briefly engages the relativism of Martin Heidegger ( who goes unnamed ), and continues with a discussion of the evolution of natural rights via an analysis of the thought of Thomas Hobbes and John Locke.

* John Bramhall-Defense of True Liberty ; Bramhall, an Anglican divine, begins a correspondence of treatises with Thomas Hobbes

Modern biblical criticism begins with the 17th century philosophers and theologians-Thomas Hobbes, Benedict Spinoza, Richard Simon and others-who began to ask questions about the origin of the biblical text, especially the Pentateuch ( the first five books of the Old Testament-Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Numbers, and Deuteronomy ).

John Locke begins by describing the state of nature, a picture much more stable than Thomas Hobbes ' state of " war of every man against every man ," and argues that all men are created equal in the state of nature by God.

What should be a state of peace very quickly begins to look like the state of war that Hobbes described ( though the ill enforcement of the law of nature does not release individuals from their obligation to it, as it does in Hobbes ).

Having chosen his ground carefully Hobbes launches an epistemological attack on metaphysics.

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.

" Calvin and Hobbes was first published on November 18, 1985.

He refused to merchandise his creations on the grounds that displaying Calvin and Hobbes images on commercially sold mugs, stickers and T-shirts would devalue the characters and their personalities.

Despite this, many knockoffs have been found, including college T-shirts which show Calvin and Hobbes binge drinking or Calvin urinating on a logo.

Watterson announced the end of Calvin and Hobbes on November 9, 1995, with the following letter to newspaper editors:

The last strip of Calvin and Hobbes was published on December 31, 1995.

Watterson has kept away from the public eye and has given no indication of resuming the strip, creating new works based on the characters, or embarking on other projects, though he has published several anthologies of Calvin and Hobbes strips.

In early 2010, Watterson was interviewed by The Plain Dealer on the 15th anniversary of the end of Calvin and Hobbes.

Since then Calvin and Hobbes creator Bill Watterson has written extensively on the issue, arguing that size reduction and dropped panels reduce both the potential and freedom of a cartoonist.

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.

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.

Natural law theories have, however, exercised a profound influence on the development of English common law, and have featured greatly in the philosophies of Thomas Aquinas, Francisco Suárez, Richard Hooker, Thomas Hobbes, Hugo Grotius, Samuel von Pufendorf, John Locke, Francis Hutcheson, Jean Jacques Burlamaqui, and Emmerich de Vattel.

Thomas Hobbes instead founded a contractualist theory of legal positivism on what all men could agree upon: what they sought ( happiness ) was subject to contention, but a broad consensus could form around what they feared ( violent death at the hands of another ).

This classification is comparatively recent ( it was not used by Aristotle or Hobbes, for instance ), and dates from the French Revolution era, when those members of the National Assembly who supported the republic, the common people and a secular society sat on the left and supporters of the monarchy, aristocratic privilege and the Church sat on the right.

Thomas Hobbes, well known for his theory of the social contract, goes on to expand this view at the start of the 17th century during the English Renaissance.

According to Locke, an absolute ruler as proposed by Hobbes is unnecessary, for natural law is based on reason and seeking peace and survival for man.

* John Locke: Like Hobbes, described a social contract theory based on citizens ' fundamental rights in the state of nature.

He departed from Hobbes in that, based on the assumption of a society in which moral values are independent of governmental authority and widely shared, he argued for a government with power limited to the protection of personal property.

John Locke, on the other hand, who gave us Two Treatises of Government and who did not believe in the divine right of kings either, sided with Aquinas and stood against both Machiavelli and Hobbes by accepting Aristotle's dictum that man seeks to be happy in a state of social harmony as a social animal.

According to Locke, an absolute ruler as proposed by Hobbes is unnecessary, for natural law is based on reason and equality, seeking peace and survival for man.

At 23 he came into prominence by a vigorous criticism of Thomas Hobbes ' theory on civil power.