"The bitterest of all quarrels was that in which Hobbes sought to defend himself against the accusations of atheistic and immoral teaching which haunted him throughout his life and persisted for decades after his death. Writers, theological and philosophical, many of them incapable of understanding Hobbes, united in these clamorous charges against him. The clergyman who wrote the "Dialogue between Philautes and Timothy" (London 1673) fairly illustrates the critics of Hobbes's own age, who believed that Hobbes had "said more for a bad life and against any other life after this than ever was pleaded by philosopher or divine to the contrary." The allusions of Locke and Berkeley to 'that atheist Hobbes' reflect the opinions of the generations following. ...Hobbes certainly teaches that there is a God, and that faith in Jesus Christ is the supreme religious duty. True, he also teaches that God is corporeal, but only in the sense in which, as he believes, men, also, are purely corporeal. However theoretically unjustified the doctrine, it is certainly compatible—as Hobbes holds it—with religious teaching. The ethics of Hobbes, also, inculcates all the practical duties of a Christian morality, though it founds them on a psychologically inadequate basis: the assumption that all men are radically selfish. In a word, Hobbes was unfairly treated; his reputation suffered unjustly; and—more unfortunate than all—the suspicion of his atheism kept people from the study of his vigorous metaphysics and his acute psychology."
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Sources
Mary Whiton Calkins, The Persistent Problems of Philosophy (1917)
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Thomas_Hobbes
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Thomas Hobbes
1588 – 1679
englischer Mathematiker, Staatstheoretiker und Philosoph
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