Thomas Hobbes And Nicholas Machiavelli Essay - 1481 Words

Thomas Hobbes and Nicholas Machiavelli embarked on the journey to create. Although depicted as nasty realists, closer reading into Machiavelli and Hobbes reveal the aspirations of idealists. Idealists who dared to imagine a different world, a world wherein man is not depraved and fallen — but is rather able to create. In effect, these idealist exalted man’s abilities rather than man’s depravity and banishment from the garden of eden. Machiavelli acknowledged that the practice of creating a political order in time meant only temporal glory is attainable, for fortuna will always win. Nonetheless, the heretical optimism of humanism created more problems than resolutions; creating stasis in chaos, time, change, creating a novel type of ethics, placing mankind in an objective position — namely, that of God’s —.Thomas Hobbes wrote during the English civil war. It appears to me that absolute claims to truth was the problem. Hobbes’ contempora ries were driven to kill because of absolute convictions, the solution is to create the skeptical man. A skeptical man with relative convictions is a governable, and more importantly, less likely to pick up a sword. Truth claims were Hobbes’ first casualty, as it is the conviction of absolutes which drove men to kill one another. The task Hobbes ventures into is extraordinary; to construct an argument for the absurdity or irrationally of the prevailing religious discourses! Hobbes nominalistic attack against language was the fiercest attackShow MoreRelated Political Philosophy Essays2485 Words   |  10 Pages they are still essential because they keep most citizens safe. So therefore, set laws, although essential, limit the free will of people no matter how sophisticated or organized they are. To support this, the theories and opinions of John Locke, Hobbes, Voltaire, and Plato will be presented. The first three of these philosophers lived at approximately the same time per iod and all support the essentiality of laws, although they limit free will. Plato lived much earlier but still has his own viewsRead MoreBranches of Philosophy8343 Words   |  34 Pages and its relation to various political systems[8]. In this period the crucial features of the philosophical method were established: a critical approach to received or established views, and the appeal to reason and argumentation. [pic] [pic] St. Thomas Aquinas [edit] Medieval philosophy (c. A.D. 500–c. 1350) Main article: Medieval philosophy Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during what is now known as the medieval era or the Middle Ages, roughly extendingRead Morehistory of philosophy5031 Words   |  21 Pagesmere logical argument at the beginning of the high medieval period was to follow Aristotelian demonstration by starting from effects and reasoning up to their causes. This took the form of the  cosmological argument, conventionally attributed to  St. Thomas Aquinas. The argument roughly is that everything that exists has a cause. But since there could not be an infinite chain of causes back into the past, there must have been an uncaused first cause. This is God. Aquinas also adapted this argument