| Author: | John Aubrey, Simon Webb, William Duggan | ISBN: | 1230000287037 |
| Publisher: | The Langley Press | Publication: | December 20, 2014 |
| Imprint: | Language: | English |
| Author: | John Aubrey, Simon Webb, William Duggan |
| ISBN: | 1230000287037 |
| Publisher: | The Langley Press |
| Publication: | December 20, 2014 |
| Imprint: | |
| Language: | English |
'When he was at Florence he contracted a friendship with the famous Galileo Galileo, whom he extremely venerated and magnified; and not only as he was a prodigious wit, but for his sweetness of nature and manners.They pretty well resembled one another as to their countenances, as by their pictures doth appear; were both cheerful and melancholic-sanguine; and had both a consimility of fate, to be hated and persecuted by ecclesiastics.'
In his 'Leviathan', Thomas Hobbes famously said that life was 'nasty, brutish and short'; but, as Simon Webb's introduction makes clear, the philosopher was not entirely pessimistic, and only applied his most famous phrase to life lived amid political chaos.
The life of Hobbes written by his close friend John Aubrey reveals a personality that could be blunt, but was never nasty or brutish. Though King Charles II thought him the 'oddest fellow he ever met with', Aubrey paints the picture of a great British philosopher who was certainly eccentric, but was also one of the leading spirits of his age.
The Langley Press edition of Aubrey's brief life of Hobbes also includes the Malmesbury philosopher's Latin prose autobiography, in a new translation by William Duggan.
See also 'Aubrey's Brief Lives: A Selection' and 'Aubrey's Brief Lives: The Elizabethans', both from the Langley Press.
'When he was at Florence he contracted a friendship with the famous Galileo Galileo, whom he extremely venerated and magnified; and not only as he was a prodigious wit, but for his sweetness of nature and manners.They pretty well resembled one another as to their countenances, as by their pictures doth appear; were both cheerful and melancholic-sanguine; and had both a consimility of fate, to be hated and persecuted by ecclesiastics.'
In his 'Leviathan', Thomas Hobbes famously said that life was 'nasty, brutish and short'; but, as Simon Webb's introduction makes clear, the philosopher was not entirely pessimistic, and only applied his most famous phrase to life lived amid political chaos.
The life of Hobbes written by his close friend John Aubrey reveals a personality that could be blunt, but was never nasty or brutish. Though King Charles II thought him the 'oddest fellow he ever met with', Aubrey paints the picture of a great British philosopher who was certainly eccentric, but was also one of the leading spirits of his age.
The Langley Press edition of Aubrey's brief life of Hobbes also includes the Malmesbury philosopher's Latin prose autobiography, in a new translation by William Duggan.
See also 'Aubrey's Brief Lives: A Selection' and 'Aubrey's Brief Lives: The Elizabethans', both from the Langley Press.
