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Leviathan

Index: El Aleph, El Aleph, OC,Obras completas. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1974. 617. El Simurgh y el águila, NED,Nueve ensayos dantescos. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe, 1982. 139. El simurg y el águila, PB,Páginas de Jorge Luis Borges. Buenos Aires: Celtia, 1982. 177. Montaigne, TR3,Textos recobrados 1956-1986. Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2004. 39.
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Hobbes treatise of political philosophy, 1651

Fishburn and Hughes: Hobbes's great work of political philosophy, published in 1651, in which he discusses the nature and function of the state and the duties of the individual. The quotation which serves as epigraph is taken from the famous concluding section on 'The kingdom of darkness' in which Hobbes, for whom ethics and politics cannot be separated from religion, rails against Papists and Presbyterians for their challenge to the authority of the sovereign. Suspicious of the Papists' allegiance to Rome, he attacks them for what he terms their superstitious attachment to Aristotelian or speculative metaphysics. As the father of modern materialism, Hobbes held that the universe was corporeal, enjoying the dimensions of magnitude, namely length, breadth and depth. This belief led him to argue against the existence of an incorporeal soul, separated from the body yet feeling the torments of fire and hell. In chapter 46, 'On darkness from vain philosophy and fabulous traditions', Hobbes discusses the definition of certain basic philosophical terms such as body, time, place, matter and form. In the quotation he is mocking scholasticism for its refusal to see eternity as an endless succession of time, but rather as a standing-still of the present. This quotation is followed by a parallel discussion of place, in a paragraph whose title is more immediately related to 'The Aleph': 'One body in many places and many bodies in one place at once.' Here Hobbes argues for the separateness of places according to the division of parts, scoffing at the incongruities of the schoolmen who try to rationalise the incomprehensible by having us believe that 'by the Almighty power of God, one body may be at one and at the same time in many places; and many bodies in one and the same time in one place; as if it were an acknowledgment of the Divine Power to say that which is, is not; or that which has been has not been.' The Aleph