James Gregory and H. P. Grice: reductio ad absurdum and freewill

By JLS
for the GC


James Gregory (1753-1821), British philosopher discussed in the last chapter of J. Harris's monumental "Liberty and necessity: the free will debate in eighteenth-century British philosophy" (Oxford, 2005). Like Dugald Stewart, Gregory was a personal friend of Reid’s, and, again like Stewart, he was significantly infuenced in his approach to the free will problem by the Essays on the Active Powers.

Nevertheless, and again like Stewart, Gregory differed from Reid in interesting ways.

Gregory thinks he can prove once and for all that the influence of motives upon human actions
is not, as the necessitarian characteristically claims, the same as the influence
of ‘physical’ causes upon their effects.

His strategy is a reductio ad absurdum of the necessitarian view.