 Hobbes thought that he would be renowned as the founder of civil philosophy just as he saw Copernicus as having initiated the “beginning of astronomy”, Galileo as having opened the “gate of natural philosophy universal” with an account of the “nature of motion”, and William Harvey as having first discovered the “science of man’s body” (see the dedicatory epistle to De Corpore; EW I.viii). He asserted that while “Natural Philosophy is… young”, civil philosophy itself is “no older than… [his] own book De Cive” (EW I.ix). As a student of historical texts in their original  languages,[10]  Hobbes was well aware of many works from antiquity to his own time addressing issues relevant to civil philosophy. By claiming civil philosophy was his invention, he intended to deny that any of those preceding works counted as philosophy.