Work Classification Layer
Compare Works
Pick two or more works to set their attribute fingerprints, dimension-by-dimension passages, and shared school embodiments side by side. Especially useful for author-stage comparisons (Wittgenstein early vs late) and for setting a single tradition's foundational texts against each other.
Leviathan
The state of nature is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short; the social contract erects the Leviathan to keep us out of it
Attribute Fingerprint
Rows where works disagree are highlighted in gold. The full ontology grid is shown.
| Attribute | Leviathan |
|---|---|
| Time · Extent | Infinite |
| Time · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Time · Grain | Continuous |
| Time · Freedom | Deterministic |
| Time · Traversability | Linear |
| Time · Dimensionality | One |
| Time · Direction | Uni-directional |
| Space · Extent | Infinite |
| Space · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Space · Curvature | Flat |
| Space · Dimensionality | Three |
| Space · Locality | Local |
| Matter · Extent | Infinite |
| Matter · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Matter · Conservation | Conserved |
| Matter · Dimensionality | Three |
| Matter · Locality | Local |
| Observer · Time Instance | Single |
| Observer · Space Instance | Single |
| Observer · Knowledge Extent | Immediate |
| Observer · Knowledge Retainment | Total |
| Observer · Physicality | Embodied |
| Observer · Agency | Active |
| Observer · Number | Plural |
| Observer · Metaphysical Agency | None |
| Observer · Moral Authority | Constructed |
| Observer · Theological Method | — |
| Energy · Extent | Infinite |
| Energy · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Energy · Conservation | Conserved |
| Energy · Dispersibility | Irreversible |
| Information · Ontological Status | Substantival |
| Information · Cosmic Conservation | Conserved |
| Information · Personal Conservation | Non-conserved |
| Information · Granularity | Discrete |
Dimension-by-Dimension Evidence
What each work's passages reveal about its stance on each of the six dimensions.
Time
Leviathan
Hobbes treats time as a real continuum in which bodies move and political institutions endure. Causation is deterministic — chapter 21's treatment of liberty and necessity is one of the clearest seventeenth-century compatibilist statements. Time is substantival, linear, unidirectional.
Space
Leviathan
Substantival, infinite, three-dimensional, locally interactive. Hobbes is a thoroughgoing post-Galilean mechanist; space is the field in which bodies move and collide.
Matter
Leviathan
The most thoroughgoing materialism of the seventeenth century. Only bodies exist; mental life consists of motions in the body; even God, on Hobbes's heterodox reading, must be a (subtle) body if real. Matter is infinite, substantival, conserved.
Observer
Leviathan
The Hobbesian observer is embodied, plural, active, driven by passions and reason in proportion. Knowledge is immediate (sensation) and built up through reckoning with names. Agency is active but compatibilist-deterministic. Moral authority is constructed: there is no natural justice prior to the political covenant. Metaphysical agency is None in the working sense — whatever God is doing, the political philosophy proceeds without him.
Energy
Leviathan
Standard mechanical energetics of the seventeenth century — substantival motion, conservation of impetus, irreversible dissipation in collisions. Hobbes is in continuous dialogue with Galilean and Cartesian physics.
Information
Leviathan
Names and their right ordering are the substantival informational structure of human reasoning. Personal information is not conserved — Hobbes is famously reticent on personal immortality, and chapter 38 reads biblical resurrection in materialist terms: the body will be raised; there is no separable soul to preserve in the interim.
Internal Tensions
Where each work's argument pulls against itself.
Hobbes's materialism and his Christianity are notoriously difficult to reconcile, and his contemporaries (Bramhall, Boyle, the Royal Society) accused him of atheism barely concealed. The political doctrine's sharpness — absolute sovereignty as the price of peace — is in tension with the concession that subjects retain the right to preserve their own lives even against the sovereign (chapter 21). Locke's Second Treatise (1689) is in part an attempt to rescue political philosophy from what Locke saw as Hobbes's authoritarian conclusion.