Thomas Hobbes
1 book in the library
Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) was an English philosopher, born in Westport, near Malmesbury in Wiltshire, in the year of the Spanish Armada; he later said that his mother, frightened by rumours of the invasion, gave birth to twins, himself and fear. After studying at Oxford he spent most of his life in the service of the Cavendish family, the earls of Devonshire, as tutor, secretary and companion, travelling widely in Europe and meeting Galileo. His first published work was a translation of Thucydides (1629). Fearing for his safety as civil war approached, he went to Paris in 1640, where he tutored the exiled future Charles II in mathematics and wrote Leviathan (1651). Back in England, his views made him suspected of atheism, and he was drawn into long disputes over geometry. Still writing in his eighties, he translated Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, and died at Hardwick Hall in 1679, aged ninety-one.
