Collins and Grice on freedom

By JLS
for the GC

Anthony Collins (1676-1729) was, like Grice, an English philosopher. He is discussed by J. Harris in his landmark "Liberty and necessity: the free will debate in eighteenth-century British philosophy" (Oxford, 2006), Collins reiterates Hobbesian arguments against the tenability of a distinction between kinds of necessity. (From wiki:) In philosophy, Collins takes a foremost place as a defender of Necessitarianism. His brief "Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty" (1715) has not been excelled, at all events in its main outlines, as a statement of the determinist standpoint. His assertion that it is self-evident that nothing that has a beginning can be without a cause is an unwarranted assumption of the very point at stake. He was attacked in an elaborate treatise by Samuel Clarke, in whose system the freedom of will is made essential to religion and morality. During Clarke's lifetime, fearing perhaps being branded as an enemy of religion and morality, Collins made no reply, but in 1729 he published an answer, entitled "Liberty and Necessity."