The Empiricism of Thomas Hobbes

One of the invited commentators on Descartes' Meditations was Thomas Hobbes, the foremost English philosopher among his contemporaries. This early encounter between Anglophone and continental philosophy was not cordial. Descartes thought Hobbes' objections trivial, and Hobbes is reported to have said ‘that had Des Cartes kept himself wholly to Geometry he had been the best Geometer in the world, but his head did not lie for Philosophy'.  Hobbes was eight years Descartes' senior, born just as the Armada arrived off England in 1588. After education at Oxford he was employed as a tutor by the Cavendish family, and spent much time on the continent. It was in Paris, during the English Civil War, that he wrote his most famous work on political philosophy, Leviathan. Three years after the execution of King Charles he returned to England to live in the household of his former pupil, now the Earl of Devonshire. He published two volumes of natural philosophy, and in old age translated into English the whole of Homer, as in youth he had translated Thucydides. He died, aged 91, in 1679.