Stewart and Grice in the freewill debate

By JLS
for the GC

Dugald Stewart (1753-1828) was a British philosopher, discussed by J. Harris in his landmark study, "Liberty and necessity: the free will debate in eighteenth-century philosophy" (Oxford, 2005). In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, the terms of the free will debate are regarded as having been set by the confrontation between Priestley and Reid. A Reidian libertarianism is developed by James Gregory and Dugald Stewart, while English writers such as Thomas Belsham and William Godwin take up Priestley’s version of necessitarianism. For Stewart, as for Locke, the principal question concerning liberty and necessity is the character of introspective experience.