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This article examines Thomas Hobbes's notorious claim that "fear and liberty are consistent" and therefore that agreements coerced by threat of violence are binding. This view is to a surprising extent inherited from Aristotle, but its political implications became especially striking in the wake of the English Civil War, and Hobbes recast his theory in far-reaching ways between his early works and Leviathan to accommodate it. I argue that Hobbes's account of coercion is both philosophically safe from the most common objections to it and politically superior to the seemingly commonsensical alternatives that we have inherited from Hobbes's critics.
In this paper, I offer an alternative account of the relationship of Hobbesian geometry to natural philosophy by arguing that mixed mathematics provided Hobbes with a model for thinking about it. In mixed mathematics, one may borrow causal principles from one science and use them in another science without there being a deductive relationship between those two sciences. Natural philosophy for Hobbes is mixed because an explanation may combine observations from experience (the 'that') with causal principles from geometry (the 'why'). My argument shows that Hobbesian natural philosophy relies upon suppositions that bodies plausibly behave according to these borrowed causal principles from geometry, acknowledging that bodies in the world may not actually behave this way. First, I consider Hobbes's relation to Aristotelian mixed mathematics and to Isaac Barrow's broadening of mixed mathematics in Mathematical Lectures (1683). I show that for Hobbes maker's knowledge from geometry provides the 'why' in mixed-mathematical explanations. Next, I examine two explanations from De corpore Part IV: (1) the explanation of sense in De corpore 25.1-2; and (2) the explanation of the swelling of parts of the body when they become warm in De corpore 27.3. In both explanations, I show Hobbes borrowing and citing geometrical principles and mixing these principles with appeals to experience.
Recent advances in sequencing technology have enabled the rapid generation of billions of bases at relatively low cost. A crucial first step in many sequencing applications is to map those reads to a reference genome. However, when the reference genome is large, finding accurate mappings poses a significant computational challenge due to the sheer amount of reads, and because many reads map to the reference sequence approximately but not exactly. We introduce Hobbes, a new gram-based program for aligning short reads, supporting Hamming and edit distance. Hobbes implements two novel techniques, which yield substantial performance improvements: an optimized gram-selection procedure for reads, and a cache-efficient filter for pruning candidate mappings. We systematically tested the performance of Hobbes on both real and simulated data with read lengths varying from 35 to 100 bp, and compared its performance with several state-of-the-art read-mapping programs, including Bowtie, BWA, mrsFast and RazerS. Hobbes is faster than all other read mapping programs we have tested while maintaining high mapping quality. Hobbes is about five times faster than Bowtie and about 2-10 times faster than BWA, depending on read length and error rate, when asked to find all mapping locations of a read in the human genome within a given Hamming or edit distance, respectively. Hobbes supports the SAM output format and is publicly available at http://hobbes.ics.uci.edu.
This paper explores Thomas Hobbes's account of animal life and mind. After a critical examination of Hobbes's mechanistic explanation of operations of the mind such as perception and memory, I argue that his theory derives its strength from his idea of the dynamic interaction of the body with its surroundings. This dynamic interaction allows Hobbes to maintain that the purposive disposition of the animal is not merely an upshot of its material configuration, but an expression of its distinctive bodily history. In support of Hobbes, I show how this is complemented by his account of the unity and continuity of the animal body in terms of a unification through the self-preserving drive that originates in perception. Nonetheless, I argue that Hobbes's philosophy of animal life and mental faculties is hindered by a kind of epiphenomenalist perspective that is embedded in his materialist framework, and this perspective leaves the status of ideas and mental content unclear. I explain why Hobbes's dynamic theory, founded upon the reciprocal determination of moving bodies, supports his idea of animal development and habituation while failing to account for the reflexivity of the mind.
Thomas Hobbes postulates that men are driven by "a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death." The miserable consequences of this drive for power and the competing "desire of ease and sensual delight" and "fear of death and wounds" lead them to establish and obey. Substituting "profit" for "power" yields a description of the modern corporation, but without the desires or fears of natural persons. Such "unnatural persons" lack the Hobbesian ground of obligation, yet have appropriated the privileges and protections of natural persons. They challenge or undermine the sovereign wherever it limits their profits. Governor Schwarzenegger's re-election in California, however, on a strong anti-CO(2) program, suggests a willingness by threatened natural persons to re-empower Leviathan. Thomas Hobbes émet l’hypothèse que tous les hommes sont mûs par [traduction] « un désir perpétuel et fébrile d’acquérir pouvoir après pouvoir, désir qui ne cesse qu’à la mort », « le désir de bien-être et de plaisirs sensuels » et « la peur de la mort et des blessures ». Les malheureuses conséquences du désir de pouvoir les incitent à édifier et à obéir à un tout-puissant État souverain : le fameux Léviathan. Remplacez « bénéfices » par « pouvoir » et vous avez une description de la personne morale moderne, mais sans les désirs ou les craintes qui animent les personnes physiques. Ces « personnes non physiques » ne sont pas tenues d’adhérer au principe d’obligation de Hobbes, et pourtant, elles se sont approprié les privilèges et les protections dont jouissent les personnes physiques. Elles minent le souverain ou contestent ses décisions lorsqu’il cherche à limiter leurs profits. Toutefois, la réélection, en Californie, du gouverneur Arnold Schwarzenegger sur la base d’un solide programme de réduction des émissions de dioxyde de carbone, montre que les personnes physiques sont disposées à redonner du pouvoir au Léviathan lorsqu’elles se sentent menacées.
This paper critically supports the modern evolutionary explanation of religion popularised by David Sloan Wilson, by comparing it with those of his predecessors, namely Emile Durkheim and Thomas Hobbes, and to some biological examples which seem analogous to religions as kinds of superorganisms in their own right. The aim of the paper is to draw out a theoretical pedigree in philosophy and sociology that is reflected down the lines of various other evolutionarily minded contributors on the subject of religion. The general theme is of evolved large-scale cooperative structures. A scholarly concern is as follows: Wilson (Darwin's Cathedral: Evolution, Religion, And The Nature Of Society, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2002) draws on Durkheim, (The elementary forms of religious life. Free Press, New york, 1912) using Calvinism as an example without mentioning Hobbes (Leviathan, Edited by E. Curley, Cambridge, Hackett, 1651), but it was Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) who used Calvinism as an example of a leviathanesque religious structure-which is not acknowledged by either Wilson or Durkheim. If there are even any similarities between these authors, there appears to be an omission somewhere which should rightly be accounted for by giving credit to Hobbes where it is due. I issue on conclusion, what it is that makes Wilson's approach radically different to that it skates on. I also issue it with a cautionary word.
Thomas Hobbes is one of the most ardent and thoroughgoing opponents of participatory democracy among Western political philosophers. Though Hobbes's alternative to participatory democracy-assent by subjects to rule by an absolute sovereign-no longer constitutes a viable political alternative for Westerners, his critique of participatory democracy is a potentially valuable source of insight about its liabilities. This essay elaborates five theses from Hobbes that stand as cogent warnings to those who embrace participatory democracy, especially those (such as most bioethicists) advocating for deliberative democracy based on a rational consensus model. In light of these warnings, the author suggests an alternative, modus vivendi approach to deliberative democracy that would radically alter the current practice of bioethics.
In this contribution, I sketch out a methodological framework for the study of controversies in the history of philosophy. It is built around four basic components: texts, contexts, pretexts and circumstances. I show how, once these four elements have been identified and systematically distinguished and distributed, a controversy has been localized and circumscribed. I show, moreover, how controversies are formally linked to each other through the migration of texts from one context to another. Next, I take as an example the controversy on the jus circa sacra, or "right of holy matters," a key controversy in the political philosophy of the early modern period, focusing in particular on the work by Grotius, Hobbes and Spinoza.
Medicines that are vital for the saving and preserving of life in conditions of public health emergency or endemic serious disease are known as essential medicines. In many developing world settings such medicines may be unavailable, or unaffordably expensive for the majority of those in need of them. Furthermore, for many serious diseases (such as HIV/AIDS and tuberculosis) these essential medicines are protected by patents that permit the patent-holder to operate a monopoly on their manufacture and supply, and to price these medicines well above marginal cost. Recent international legal doctrine has placed great stress on the need to globalise intellectual property rights protections, and on the rights of intellectual property rights holders to have their property rights enforced. Although international intellectual property rights law does permit compulsory licensing of protected inventions in the interests of public health, the use of this right by sovereign states has proved highly controversial. In this paper I give an argument in support of states' sovereign right to expropriate private intellectual property in conditions of public health emergency. This argument turns on a social contract argument for the legitimacy of states. The argument shows, further, that under some circumstances states are not merely permitted compulsory to license inventions, but are actually obliged to do so, on pain of failure of their legitimacy as sovereign states. The argument draws freely on a loose interpretation of Thomas Hobbes's arguments in his Leviathan, and on an analogy between his state of War and the situation of public health disasters.
Based on interviews with Beirut intellectuals and architects, this essay endeavours to trace the contours for a phenomenology or anthropology of civil war. Thomas Hobbes serves as a guide, with his idea of civil war representing a relapse into the ‘state of nature’; as absence of sovereignty resulting in a ‘war of everybody against everybody’. The effects of ever-latent civil war in Beirut are far-reaching: the fragmentation of urban space and the disappearance of public space, the loss of memory and the fragmentation of time, even the reification of language. In the collective imagination and in the arts, Beirut appears as a ghost town, a spectral city with a spectral civility. What we discover is a city, its inhabitants, its social behaviour, but also its art and literature, in the grip of post-traumatic stress syndrome. From all this, we take home two things: first, any city can (at least in principle) relapse into a similar state of nature — Beirut can become a paradigm of latent civil war; and second, the traumatic modernity of Beirut mirrors the traumatic artistic expressions of modernism — the shock of modernity is also always a modernity of shock.
IntroductionHealthcare leaders are expected to deliver safer care, better outcomes, and improved access while navigating workforce shortages, moral distress, and administrative burden. Improvement efforts oscillate between culture-first and systems-first approaches, each generating predictable failure modes - metric gaming, burnout, superficial compliance, and persistent safety variation. A practical, integrative framework for quality leadership that spans culture, systems, incentives, and governance is lacking.MethodsThis conceptual synthesis develops a 'moral ecology' model for quality leadership by analyzing six philosophical traditions - Aristotle, Avicenna, Taoist thought, Hobbes, Mandeville, and Voltaire. Traditions were selected using explicit inclusion criteria: each must foreground a distinct assumption about human motivation, generate a unique and recurring failure mode in healthcare quality, and correspond to a recognizable domain in quality improvement literature. The synthesis was conducted without geographic restriction, with healthcare leadership evidence drawn from publications through 2025. Reporting follows an SRQR-adapted framework for conceptual synthesis.ResultsThe six-domain moral ecology framework specifies: professionalism and character formation (Aristotle); truth-seeking and psychological safety (Avicenna); flow and simplification of work (Taoism); enforceable order in crisis (Hobbes); incentive alignment (Mandeville); and dignity with procedural justice (Voltaire). Each domain addresses a predictable failure mode - moralizing without redesign, purity culture, permissive tolerance, fear-based compliance, metric gaming, or scapegoating - and maps to specific leadership levers. The framework includes a five-step quick-start guide, six leadership commitments, diagnostic questions, and a balanced scorecard pairing quantitative indicators with qualitative signals. A worked acute myocardial infarction example and two additional cardiology mini-scenarios illustrate application across procedural and imaging contexts.ConclusionHigh-reliability care cannot be achieved by exhorting clinicians to be better people or by building ever more rules that assume they are not. The six-domain moral ecology framework reframes quality leadership as stewardship of an interconnected environment of character, learning, work design, authority, incentives, and fair governance. The framework provides a practical decision aid when initiatives stall or backfire - including under conditions of epistemic uncertainty and ambiguous causal attribution - by identifying the missing moral lever and the failure mode shaping current performance.
Therapies targeting the RAF-MEK-ERK pathway are generally considered to have limited efficacy in KRAS-mutant cancers. However, specific KRAS mutants exhibit distinct behaviors. Notably, KRASG12R pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC) tumors have shown sensitivity to MEK inhibitors (MEKi) in combination with autophagy inhibitors, but a better understanding of the underlying mechanisms is needed to optimize this treatment strategy. Using a systems-level approach, we uncovered a mechanistic explanation for this phenomenon. Due to distinct biophysical properties, KRASG12R had an impaired ability to activate wild-type HRAS and NRAS (WT-RAS) compared with other KRAS mutants, such as KRASG12D. This reduced activation stemmed from the weaker interaction between KRASG12R and guanine exchange factors (SOS), as well as the tumor suppressor neurofibromin (NF1), crucial in regulating WT-RAS activity. The impaired ability to activate WT-RAS led to weaker holistic MAPK signaling in KRASG12R-driven tumors, which conferred increased sensitivity to MEKi. To substantiate the preclinical findings, the utility of MEKi in combination with the autophagy inhibitor hydroxychloroquine was analyzed in patients with KRASG12R-mutated metastatic PDAC. Five of the eight (62.5%) patients treated in first- or second-line settings had a progression-free survival exceeding 6 months. Three patients had impressive disease control: two had stable disease of 11 and 22.7 months, and one achieved a partial response with an 83% decrease in tumor size that lasted for 8.9 months. Overall, this work highlights how systems-based approaches in precision medicine can uncover mechanistic insights to guide the identification of patients with PDAC most likely to benefit from tailored therapeutic strategies. The unique sensitivity of KRASG12R-mutant cancers to MEK inhibitors offers a critical advancement in understanding MAPK signaling and paving the way for precision-targeted therapies in previously untreatable contexts. See related commentary by Tiriac and Engle, p. 1817 See related article by Burge et al., p. 1854 See related article by Burge et al., p. 1868.
Johann Conrad Dippel (1673-1734) was a theologian, a physician, and a (probably autodidactic) chemist. He had no viable scientific theory, dismissed atomism and relentlessly attacked the rational philosophies of Descartes, Spinoza, Hobbes, Leibniz, and Wolff as a radical Pietist, for whom body and mind constitute an inseparable whole. By implication he rejected Newton, but accepted Aristotle partially. He vehemently rejected Descartes' animal (man)-machine and therefore also Boerhaave's nervous machine. His claim of gold-making was the probable reason for his call to Berlin, where he prepared not gold but his animal pyrolysis oil (Dippel's oil) by pyrolysis of blood, leading to the co-discovery of Prussian blue. Later he made impossible promises of gold-making to Denmark's King Frederik IV. His wonder-balm was claimed to heal all wounds, including that caused by a nail hammered into a dog's skull. His phytomedicines were derived from Galen and Dioscorides; his chemical medicines from Paracelsus and Valentine. He denied the possibility of establishing general rules for medicine and did not express an opinion on the leading chemical theory, the phlogiston. In the absence of any plausible chemical and medicinal theories, Dippel relied on the almighty God, to guide him to produce gold and a medicinal arcanum.
This review explores Jean Hamburger's "The Diary of William Harvey," a novel published in 1983 that imaginatively reconstructs the life and thoughts of William Harvey, the pioneering scientist who discovered blood circulation. Hamburger, a prominent figure in nephrology, crafts a narrative that spans from 1647 to 1654, offering a fictional diary that delves into Harvey's reflections on his scientific achievements and the turbulent political landscape of 17th-century England. The book provides insights into Harvey's interactions with notable contemporaries, including King Charles I and Thomas Hobbes, while highlighting his challenges against prevailing medical doctrines. Hamburger's portrayal emphasizes Harvey's commitment to empirical evidence and his philosophical musings on life and the human condition. The novel captures Harvey's struggle against the entrenched beliefs of his time, particularly the Galenic doctrine, and his dedication to scientific inquiry despite resistance from figures like James Primrose and Jean Riolan. Through vivid imagery, Hamburger explores Harvey's innovative research approach, including his studies on the heart and his analogy of the heart to a bagpipe. The book also reflects on Harvey's personal life and loyalty to King Charles I. Hamburger's work transcends mere historical fiction, offering a profound meditation on the essence of scientific inquiry and the human spirit. "The Diary of William Harvey" serves as a testament to the enduring impact of those who challenge conventional wisdom and pursue knowledge with courage and compassion, making it relevant to contemporary discussions in medicine, philosophy, and ethics.
The philosopher Thomas Hobbes famously described life in 1651 as "nasty, brutish, and short." He was undeniably correct, with estimates of average life expectancy in the UK at the time ranging from 37 to 40 years, largely owing to a high infant mortality rate. For example, in London, there were an estimated 251 deaths per 1000 live births. The situation was even more dire in the early American colonies, particularly in the Southern colonies, where infectious diseases were rampant. Even as recently as 50 years ago, global infant mortality rates were around 100 deaths per 1000 live births, at a time when fewer than 5% of children in developing countries received even a single vaccine dose.
Hobbes' Leviathan symbolizes state sovereignty. In public health, this concept now extends to the prevention and promotion of health and the fight against non-communicable diseases (NCDs). This article explores the evolution towards an i-Leviathan, utilizing health data for more effective health surveillance. Precision public health, grounded in a personalized law approach, relies on the collection, availability, and use of these health data. This article analyzes the legal challenges of this precision, such as stigmatization, discrimination, and repression. It addresses the balance between public interests and individual freedoms, outlining state measures to monitor, control, and discipline healthy individuals. Le Léviathan de Hobbes symbolise la souveraineté étatique. En santé publique, ce concept s’étend aujourd’hui à la prévention et la promotion de la santé et à la lutte contre les maladies non transmissibles. Cet article explore l’évolution vers un i-Léviathan, recourant à nos données de santé en vue d’une surveillance sanitaire plus efficace. Une santé publique de précision, ancrée dans une approche de droit personnalisé, dépend de la collecte, de la disponibilité et de l’utilisation de ces données de santé. Cet article analyse les enjeux juridiques de cette précision, tels que la stigmatisation, la discrimination et la répression. Il fait état de la balance entre intérêts publics et libertés individuelles, traçant les démarches étatiques de surveiller, contrôler et discipliner l’individu en bonne santé.
Next-generation sequencing (NGS) enables rapid production of billions of bases at a relatively low cost. Mapping reads from next-generation sequencers to a given reference genome is an important first step in many sequencing applications. Popular read mappers, such as Bowtie and BWA, are optimized to return top one or a few candidate locations of each read. However, identifying all mapping locations of each read, instead of just one or a few, is also important in some sequencing applications such as ChIP-seq for discovering binding sites in repeat regions, and RNA-seq for transcript abundance estimation. Here we present Hobbes2, a software package designed for fast and accurate alignment of NGS reads and specialized in identifying all mapping locations of each read. Hobbes2 efficiently identifies all mapping locations of reads using a novel technique that utilizes additional prefix q-grams to improve filtering. We extensively compare Hobbes2 with state-of-the-art read mappers, and show that Hobbes2 can be an order of magnitude faster than other read mappers while consuming less memory space and achieving similar accuracy. We propose Hobbes2 to improve the accuracy of read mapping, specialized in identifying all mapping locations of each read. Hobbes2 is implemented in C++, and the source code is freely available for download at http://hobbes.ics.uci.edu.
The social-contract tradition of Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, and Rawls has been widely influential in moral philosophy but has until recently received relatively little attention in moral psychology. For contractualist moral theories, ethics is a matter of forming, adhering to, and enforcing (hypothetical) agreements, and morality is fundamentally about acting according to what would be agreed by rational agents. A recent psychological theory, virtual bargaining, models social interactions in contractualist terms, suggesting that we often act as we would agree to do if we were to negotiate explicitly. However, whether such contractualist tendencies (a propensity to make typically contractualist choices) and forms of reasoning (agreement-based cognitive processes) play a role in moral cognition is still unclear. Drawing upon virtual bargaining, we develop two novel experimental paradigms designed to elicit incentivized decisions and moral judgments. We then test the descriptive relevance of contractualism in moral judgment and decision making in five preregistered online experiments (n = 4103; English-speaking Prolific participants). In the first task, we find evidence that many participants show contractualist tendencies: their choices are "characteristically" contractualist. In the second task, we find evidence consistent with contractualist reasoning influencing some participants' judgments and incentivized decisions. Our findings suggest that a propensity to act as prescribed by tacit agreements may be particularly important in understanding the moral psychology of fleeting social interactions and coordination problems. By complementing the rich literature on deontology and consequentialism in moral psychology, empirical approaches inspired by contractualism may prove fruitful to better understand moral cognition.
Patent foramen ovale (PFO) is a common congenital cardiac abnormality. Risk of stroke increases perioperatively, but the association of PFO with perioperative stroke risk remains unclear. We conducted a systematic review to inform the risk of perioperative stroke in patients with PFO undergoing surgery. Embase, MEDLINE, and Cochrane databases were searched from inception to January 2020. We described methods used for establishing PFO and perioperative stroke diagnosis. We conducted meta-analyses to obtain pooled estimates for risk of stroke in patients with and without PFO in different surgical populations. Ten articles with a total of 20,858,011 patients met the eligibility criteria. Prevalence of PFO ranged from 0.06% to 1.4% based on International Classification of Diseases (ICD)-code diagnosis and from 10.4% to 40.4% based on echocardiography diagnosis. Perioperative stroke was observed in 0% to 25% of patients with PFO, and 0% to 16.7% without PFO. Studies that used echocardiography to diagnose PFO found no association between PFO and perioperative stroke. Studies that used ICD codes found strong association but were highly heterogeneous. PFO was not associated with a risk of perioperative stroke in cardiac and transplantation surgeries. While the adjusted odds ratios for stroke were substantial for orthopaedic, general, genitourinary, neurologic, and thoracic surgeries (with PFO status established based on ICD codes), data heterogeneity and quality of data create significant uncertainty. In conclusion, PFO is likely a risk factor for perioperative stroke in selected types of surgeries. However, this is based on very low-quality evidence. Rigorous prospective studies are needed to further investigate this relationship.