The Connection Between The Enlightenment And Thomas Hobbes

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The Scientific Revolution of the early 17th century signalled a fundamental break from the contemporary Renaissance world-view, which based its approach on the ideas of Aristotle and subsequent medieval philosophical and theological thinkers.1 It's methodology employed empiricism, logic, mathematics, reason, and the Mechanical Philosophy of cause and effect to explain the physical world, as opposed to the reliance on unreliable sensory knowledge and religious revelation which had dominated earlier thinking.2 As shall be shown, this empirical methodology was extremely influential to the subsequent Enlightenment thinkers, whose epistemological basis was a belief in the use of inductive knowledge and reason to confront social and existential problems, and thereby progress as a species.3 As such the Scientific Revolution can be seen to be a direct causal factor of the Enlightenment, and was subsequently further reified by the support of Enlightenment thought, which “...provided it with the institutional, cultural, and political bases that …show more content…
Although generally renowned for his seminal political philosophy, Hobbes was originally a mathematician, who had met with Scientific Revolution figures such as Galileo.18 His ground-breaking work Leviathan utilised the analogy of society as a machine similar to a human body, constituted of competing desires representing “...a plurality of voices and interests [which] can become 'one will'”19 i.e. that of the sovereign. Hobbes felt it was necessary to invest absolute power in an individual sovereign due to his conception of man in a 'state of nature' (i.e. pre-political, with no governance) as selfish and interested only in fulfilling his desires. This would result in a “warre of every man against every man”,20 wherein life would be “solitary, poore, nasty, brutish, and

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