When I first read the opening from Hobbes’ Leviathan as an undergraduate, I laughed.  I laughed heartily.   There was something clearly, and quaintly, absurd about his simple (though perhaps vaguely Rube-Goldberg-esque) chain of mechanistic causal events which for him became the workings of the universe.  From Hobbes, Leviathan, Chapter 1: Of Sense: The cause […]