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[[Image:Bhmvgjhfj.jpg|right|thumb|Thomas Hobbes]]

[[Image:Bhmvgjhfj.jpg|right|thumb|Thomas Hobbes]]

'''Thomas Hobbes''' (1588-1679) was an English [[philosopher]], political theorist, historian, optical scientist, translator and classicist. Hobbes was notable as one of the founders of [[social contract]] theory, and a forerunner of [[British empiricism]].  As a [[materialism|materialist]], his concept of human existence excluded the [[soul]], with the [[mind]] being given a purely mechanical explanation.  He was widely rumoured during his lifetime to be an atheist, which was illegal on 16th century England.

'''Thomas Hobbes''' (1588-1679) was an English [[philosopher]], political theorist, historian, optical scientist, translator and classicist. Hobbes was notable as one of the founders of [[social contract]] theory, and a forerunner of [[British empiricism]].  As a [[materialism|materialist]], his concept of human existence excluded the [[soul]], with the [[mind]] being given a purely mechanical explanation.  He was widely rumoured during his lifetime to be an atheist, which was illegal on 16th century England. Hobbes' contemporary, the Earl of Clarendon, claimed that the philosopher was "a pander to bestiality" whose "doctrines have had so great a share of the debauchery of his Generation, that a good Christian can hardly hear his name without saying of his prayers."<ref>Samuel I. Mintz, The Hunting of Leviathan: Seventeenth-Century Reactions to the Materialism and Moral Philosophy of Thomas Hobbes (Cambridge, 1962), 57. </ref>

Hobbes saw matter in motion as the only reality.  To him even consciousness and thought were but the byproducts of atoms moving in the brain.<ref>The New American Desk Encyclopedia, Penguin Group, 1989</ref>

Hobbes saw matter in motion as the only reality.  To him even consciousness and thought were but the byproducts of atoms moving in the brain.<ref>The New American Desk Encyclopedia, Penguin Group, 1989</ref>