Show Summary Details

Page of

PRINTED FROM OXFORD HANDBOOKS ONLINE (www.oxfordhandbooks.com). © Oxford University Press, 2018. All Rights Reserved. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a PDF of a single chapter of a title in Oxford Handbooks Online for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 28 February 2021

Abstract and Keywords

This chapter examines eighteenth-century British discussions of human freedom, which focused on the question of whether the will is a self-determining, or active power, or whether the will is determined, or necessitated, by motives. (Libertarians were proponents of the former position; necessitarians supported the latter position.) The chapter begins with a consideration of the libertarian position of Samuel Clarke, which was taken up by the later libertarians Richard Price and Thomas Reid. It considers two necessitarians: David Hartley and Joseph Priestley. Although David Hume was taken to be a necessitarian, both by his contemporaries and recent commentators, the chapter suggests that Hume challenged assumptions about the nature of the very problem of liberty and necessity shared by his contemporaries, libertarians and necessitarians alike, although this challenge remained unanswered, because ignored, in the eighteenth century.

Keywords: Clarke, Hume, freedom, Hartley, libertarian, liberty, necessitarian, necessity, Price, Priestley, Reid, will

Sean Greenberg

Sean Greenberg is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Irvine. His chief research interest is in early modern moral psychology, especially conceptions of passions and the will: he has published on Descartes's, Malebranche's, and Leibniz's accounts of these topics. He is currently working on three projects: a new edition and translation of Leibniz's Theodicy (in conjunction with R. C. Sleigh, Jr.); a systematic interpretation of the philosophy of Malebranche; and a history of early modern approaches to human freedom.

Access to the complete content on Oxford Handbooks Online requires a subscription or purchase. Public users are able to search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter without a subscription.

Please subscribe or login to access full text content.

If you have purchased a print title that contains an access token, please see the token for information about how to register your code.

For questions on access or troubleshooting, please check our FAQs, and if you can''t find the answer there, please contact us.