ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes is now known mainly as a political philosopher; but in his lifetime, he was equally famous as a metaphysician and natural philosopher. Hobbes took the radical step of reducing everything to matter in motion, and the main question for his philosophy is whether the phenomena of human experience can be accounted for on the basis of these concepts alone. The most controversial aspect of Hobbes’s materialism is his denial of immaterial substance. From a theological perspective, a major difficulty with Hobbes’s materialism might seem to be that it is incompatible with Christian belief in immortality. Just as language is a purely natural phenomenon, reasoning is an equally natural process depending on it, and not requiring an immaterial soul. He earned himself a well-deserved place in the history of metaphysics through his arguments against immaterial beings, his naturalistic account of human language and reason, and his concept of matter as essentially active.
