INTRODUCTION AND BACKGROUND

Determinism, broadly speaking, is the doctrine that whatever happens in the world is brought about by causes other than itself. In this sense, all the major philosophers of the seventeenth century – with the possible exception of Male-branche – were determinists. But these same philosophers also believed in human freedom. It follows that each of them (again, perhaps excepting Malebranche) was a compatibilist with respect to freedom and determination: each held that being free is logically compatible with being causally determined. Yet their specific teachings on this subject are very different from one another. For they had very different views on the nature and scope of human freedom, and different conceptions of causation.

This chapter concentrates on the teachings of these major figures: Descartes, Hobbes, Spinoza, Malebranche, Locke, and Leibniz. There were, of course, other seventeenth-century thinkers who concerned themselves with freedom and determinism – this was one of the most frequently debated issues of the age. And some of these others, in opposition to the philosophers, were incompatibilists. They held that an action logically cannot both be causally determined and be free, in any proper sense of ‘free’. An incompatibilist has two options: adhere to determination and deny that anything or anyone is free (this is hard determinism) or admit free actions and claim that these are undetermined, and thereby reject the doctrine of determinism (this is libertarianism). We know of no seventeenth-century thinker who took the hard determinist position, but quite a few were libertarians.