Priestley as having provoked Kant (and thus Grice!)

by JLS
for the GC

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) was English philosopher. Between 1774 and 1778, while serving as an assistant to Lord Shelburne, Priestley wrote a series of five major metaphysical works, arguing for a materialist philosophy even though such a position

"entailed denial of free will and the soul."

Continuing the arguments he had started in "The Examination of Dr. Reid's Inquiry, Dr. Beattie's Essay, and Dr. Oswald's Appeal" (1774) and "Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit" (1777), Priestley published

"The Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, being an appendix to the Disquisitions relating to matter and spirit. To which is added an answer to the Letters on materialism, and on Hartley’s Theory of the mind. London: Printed for J. Johnson (1777).

In this "appendix" to the Disquisitions he "suggests that materialism and determinism are mutually supporting."

Priestley explicitly states that humans had no free will.

"All things, past, present, and to come, are precisely what the Author of nature really intended them to be, and has made provision for."

Priestley was the first to claim that what he called "philosophical necessity" (a position akin to absolute determinism) is consonant with Christianity.

His philosophy was based on his theological interpretation of the natural world. Like the rest of nature, man's mind is subject to the laws of causation, but because a benevolent God created these laws, Priestley argues, the world and the men in it will eventually be perfected.

Priestley argues that the associations made in a person's mind were a necessary product of their lived experience because Hartley's theory of associationism was analogous to natural laws such as gravity.

Priestley contends that his necessarianism can be distinguished from fatalism and predestination because it relies on natural law.

Isaac Kramnick points out the paradox of Priestley's positions. As a reformer, he argued that political change was essential to human happiness and urged his readers to participate, but he also claimed in works such as "Philosophical Necessity" that humans have no free will.

"Philosophical Necessity influenced the 19th-century utilitarians John Stuart Mill and Herbert Spencer, who were drawn to its determinism.

Immanuel Kant, entranced by Priestley's determinism but repelled by his reliance on observed reality, created a transcendental version of determinism that he claimed allowed the mind and soul freedom.

From "Joseph Priestley, Scientist, Philosopher, and Theologian" (Oxford) edited by Isabel Rivers and David L. Wykes,

at:

http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5235Z.pdf

"For Priestley, philosophical necessity is supported by an absolutely general and compelling argument from the nature of cause and effect."

"As such, it relies on the truth neither of the association of ideas nor of materialism."

"Whether one considers inanimate bodies, such as a balance, or mental phenomena, the same circumstances—states of mind and views of things—invariably result in the same effect."
"Given the invariability of the effect, the only reasonable conclusion is

----- "that there must be a sufficient reason in the nature of the things, why it should be produced in these circumstances" (Priestley, "Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity, p. 10)."

See also James A. Harris, ‘Joseph Priestley and “the Proper Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity” ’, E&D, 20 (2001), 23–44, and especially his "Of Liberty and Necessity: The Free Will Debate in Eighteenth-Century British Philosophy" (Oxford: OUP, 2005), 167–78.