ABSTRACT
Thomas Hobbes was well read in the ancients, but the chief stimulus to his interest in scientific materialism seems to have been the burgeoning science of his day. Hobbes' audacious idea thus complemented the nearly contemporary and more influential teachings of Rene Descartes that the rest of nature is a mechanism. Despite the long identification of Newtonian mechanics and deterministic science, however, Isaac Newton was far from joining Hobbes in determinism and was less mechanistic than Descartes. Pierre Simon de Laplace was not only Newton's historical successor, he was the perfecter of Newtonian mechanics. But while God's foreknowledge has generally been viewed as benign by philosophers, Laplace's Demon has raised a fearsome specter. Characteristically, Hobbes sought to remove punishment from its traditional throne in the ambit of God and the moralists, and reinstate it in a causal role in the practical world.
