Terminology Tuesday: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
English philosopher best known for his political thought, though he also developed a mechanistic, deterministic, materialistic metaphysic and an empiricist epistemology. In his Leviathan Hobbes developed a form of social contract theory, in which humans give up the rights they have in the state of nature, where life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short,” and create a commonwealth by assigning those rights to a sovereign. The sovereign determines what is just and unjust, and thus the sovereign itself (a person or group) cannot be unjust. See also empiricism; epistemology; materialism.
Evans, C. Stephen, Pocket Dictionary of Apologetics & Philosophy of Religion (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity Press, 2002).