"while generally regarded as a text on political philosophy, leviathan is also a treatise on the natural sciences that was written before newton, einstein, freud, jung, darwin and gauss. further, while hobbes may have been friends with bacon, he shows no interest in the scientific method, preferring to emulate the synthetic philosophy of geometers past. worse, he builds his politics out of his understanding of the natural sciences using a method then referred to as materialism (which is related to but quite different than what we think of as materialism today). the result can only be described as a lot of nonsense, written from a point of extreme ignorance."

from time to time, hobbes surprises but these surprises are a function of my own ignorance rather than hobbes' insight. the most important thing i've learned reading hobbes is that a number of ideas that i thought were attributable to newton are in fact older (and mostly attributable to galileo).