Talk:Thomas Hobbes

Early life

The Early life section wrote:

Having been born prematurely when his mother heard of the coming invasion of the Spanish Armada, ...

How? Since

The Spanish Armada, the Spanish fleet of 130 ships sailed from Corunna in late May 1588.

How his mother heard of the coming invasion in the early April 1588? --Diszi (talk) 06:08, 25 August 2020 (UTC)

If you look at the topic "The Spanish Armada's role" etc. that I have added to this page, you will have your answer as to what the article is talking about with that strange claim. Gulielmus Rosseus (talk) 22:15, 20 August 2024 (UTC)

Opposition: Cambridge Platonists

I know that the Cambridge Platonists — Ralph Cudworth in particular — opposed Hobbes and his contention that morality is sanctioned by the state.

"Cudworth’s critique of Hobbes is the most extensive and philosophical of contemporary responses to Hobbes, whom he attacks as an atheist materialist (Mintz 1962, Zarka 1997). He accuses Hobbes of “villanizing of human nature”, and treating morality is a matter of convention. He attacks his natural law theory as merely “artificiall justice” without foundation in natural goodness, charging that Hobbes’s negative conception of human nature renders civil government a necessary evil, void of true justice. He regarded Hobbes’s natural philosophy as a paradigm case of deterministic materialism. And he attacked Hobbes’s mechanistic account of mental operations, arguing that if all mental activity reduces to matter in motion, we could never stop the flow of thoughts, focus our minds on anything, or direct our attention. The fact that we can do so tells against Hobbesian psychology and confirms the agency non-material powers." — The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy SpicyMemes123 (talk) 04:25, 24 April 2022 (UTC)

The Spanish Armada's role in Hobbes's birth

A fun one this. The article currently notes that "Hobbes was born prematurely due to his mother's fear of the Spanish Armada." The article does not footnote a source for this. But it is a reference to a story related by Hobbes himself, e.g. in his English verse autobiography, which relates that

"For Fame had rumour'd, that a Fleet at Sea, Wou'd cause our Nations Catastrophe; And hereupon it was my Mother Dear Did bring forth Twins at once, both Me, and Fear."

Aubrey in his famous biography of Hobbes in the larger Brief Lives reports likewise that "His mother fell in labour with him upon the fright of the invasion of the Spaniards" and quotes the (Latin version of the) verse autobiography in support of it.

However, as you might expect, Hobbes historians have wanted to spoil the fun by asking serious questions about the probability of this story. For one thing, Hobbes was born many weeks before the Spanish Armada set sail. My sense anyway is that Hobbes was joking.

I'm considering having a deeper look at this article as there are areas where I think considerable content could be added to it. But I wanted to leave these notes here in case I don't have time to take up the project and someone else finds themselves disturbed by this strange claim having such a prominent place, unfootnoted, in the article. Gulielmus Rosseus (talk) 22:13, 20 August 2024 (UTC)