ABSTRACT
The modern philosophical debate about the freedom of the will, which seems to have begun by an exchange between Hobbes and Bishop Bramhall, has long since degenerated into a dialogue of the deaf; and nothing is to be gained by joining it. Those who applaud Hobbes’s Questions concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance applaud Daniel Dennett’s Elbow Room. And they shake their heads over the benighted souls who cannot grasp the truth plainly declared to them by the great cloud of witnesses that includes Hume, J.S. Mill. G.E. Moore (in one phase), Dickinson Miller (writing as R.E. Hobart), and Paul Marhenke (writing as the University of California Associates). Those who applaud Thomas Reid’s defence of Bramhall’s position in Essays on the Active Powers of the Human Mind applaud Peter van Inwagen’s Essay on Free Will. (This, and Benson Mates’s chapter in his Skeptical Essays, are the best recent studies of the topic.) And they in turn are bewildered by the inability of Hobbes’s admirers to perceive what is evident to another cloud of witnesses: one that includes William James, R.M. Chisholm, Austin Farrer and G.E.M. Anscombe.
