It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes, who was a local philosopher, said about it, you know, because you weren't going to be talking final causes.

Before Darwin, philosophical speculation shaped our psychological understanding. But even great philosophers Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Hume, Locke, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and others could only describe current mental events and behaviors they could not explain their causes.

The first person to really explain that was Thomas Hobbes, who, in 1651, explained how arithmetic and logic are the same thing, and if you want to do artificial thinking and artificial logic, you can do it all with arithmetic.

That some would now question whether the humanities have any impact at all merely reflects the crude and short sighted way in which the value of academic knowledge is measured and judged today. Perhaps that befits creatures whose lives are solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short, to recall Thomas Hobbes description of the state of nature.

Life becomes an episode of The Sopranos. Hobbes' solution, the Leviathan, was that if authority for the legitimate use of violence was vested in a single democratic agency a leviathan then such a state can reduce the temptation of attack, because any kind of aggression will be punished, leaving its profitability as zero. That would remove the temptation to invade preemptively, out of fear of them attacking you first.