Thomas Hobbes · Politics

Matter in Motion

Hobbes’s radical foundation: that everything - bodies, thoughts, desires, the state itself - is just matter in motion, to be studied with the rigour of geometry.

What you'll be able to recall

You learned that Hobbes tried to build politics on a mechanical science of human nature. Explain how he reduces thought and desire to motion, and what that buys his political theory, in your own words.

Leads to Baruch Spinoza.

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