How Leviathan drew on The Nicomachean Ethics
A documented line of influence: Thomas Hobbes demonstrably engaged Aristotle’s work. The commentary below is Gröblé’s, verbatim from each work’s page.
The source
The Nicomachean Ethics
Aristotle · c. 330 BCE
Ancient GreeceThe influenced
Leviathan
Thomas Hobbes · 1651
EnlightenmentRelevance
7/10
On Leviathan’s page
- Leviathan defines itself against Aristotle — Hobbes quotes the "old moral philosophers" only to reject their highest good by name
- Where the Ethics makes happiness a single complete end, Hobbes makes it restless, endless desire, and rejects the political-animal premise for a war of all against all
- Read Aristotle first and Hobbes's opening moves snap into focus as a deliberate refutation
On The Nicomachean Ethics’s page
- Hobbes built part of Leviathan by naming Aristotle and tearing him down
- He flatly rejects the Ethics' central claim: "There is no such Finis ultimus nor Summum Bonum as is spoken of in the old books of the old moral philosophers" — happiness, for Hobbes, is "a continual progress of the desire, from one object to another"
- Influence by opposition: the Ethics' final good is the exact target Hobbes sets up to demolish