In April 1588, panic over the approaching Spanish Armada sent a pregnant woman in Westport into premature labor, and Thomas Hobbes later said his mother gave birth to twins: himself and fear. This episode traces how a boy abandoned by a brawling, anti-intellectual clergyman father and bankrolled by a glove-manufacturing uncle became a prodigy translating Greek tragedies, rejected Aristotle's teleology at Oxford, and landed the tutoring job with the Cavendish family that gave him decades of protection, income, and access to Europe's scientific revolution, including work with Francis Bacon and a 1636 visit to Galileo under house arrest.

We then explain Hobbes's philosophy of matter in motion, his view of humans as biological machines driven by appetite and aversion, and the determinism that horrified his contemporaries. Watching the English C ...