Did Nowell-Smith influence Grice? And Hartley Priestley?

by JLS
for the GC


David Hartley (1705-1777) was, like Grice, an English philosopher.

At the end of the first part of his "Observations on
Man, his frame, his duty, and his expectations. In Two Parts" (1749) he
presents an argument for necessitarianism that emphasises the obvious influence
of motives upon choice, and that straightforwardly, and unusually, denies
that we experience ourselves as free in our choices. Hartley’s style of
philosophizing is taken up by Abraham Tucker and Joseph Priestley. Priestley
deploys the rhetoric of Newtonian natural philosophy in his writings on free
will, and seeks to establish that necessitarianism is the only position
compatible with a ‘scientific’ approach to human action.

The 2nd edn, of "Observations", trans. from the German, with A Sketch of
the Life and Character of David Hartley by his son David Hartley, 1791; 1st
edn repr. with an Introduction by Theodore L. Huguelet, Delmar, New York,
1976).

This relates more to Priestley, but still:

_http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5235Z.pdf_
(http://www.thedivineconspiracy.org/Z5235Z.pdf)

At Daventry Priestley came to embrace, as he describes it,

‘the heterodox side of almost every question’.8

A reference in a lecture to David Hartley’s "Observations on Man"
led him to read the work.9

Priestley was not only convinced by Hartley’s account of the mind
based solely on the association of ideas derived from sensory experience,
but was also confirmed in his commitment to the doctrine of
necessity.10

Of this last, Priestley remarks:

‘There is no truth of which
I have less doubt, and of the ground of which I am more fully satisfied.
Indeed, there is no absurdity more glaring to my understanding than
the notion of Philosophical

Liberty.’11

----

"For Priestley, philosophical
liberty, or the power to initiate motion or to act in a certain way or
otherwise while the circumstances are the same, is a philosophical
fantasy that bears no real relation to what we ordinarily mean or
should mean by ‘liberty’."

"The conception of philosophical liberty Priestley mocks is one
he had earlier embraced."

"The first philosophical exchange he recalls
in his memoirs occurred between himself and the freethinker Peter
Annet around 1749–51.12"

"Priestley had learned Annet’s system of
shorthand and wrote to suggest improvements. Their correspondence
broadened into a debate over philosophical liberty and necessity:
Priestley defended philosophical liberty while Annet’s efforts to dislodge
him from that view failed. He was later pleased that he rejected
Annet’s offer to publish their correspondence because where Annet
failed to convince him, the reading of Anthony Collins’s Philosophical
Inquiry concerning Human Liberty soon thereafter did.13 Of Collins’s
little book Priestley remarks: ‘This treatise is concise and methodical,
and is, in my opinion, sufficient to give intire satisfaction to every
unprejudiced person’.14 He later oversaw its republication in 1790,
adding a critical preface.15 His own debate on this and related issues
with Richard Price mirrors Collins’s debates with Samuel Clarke
(1675–1729), England’s great rationalist metaphysician, earlier in the
century.16

"If reading Collins first persuaded Priestley of the doctrine of
philosophical
necessity, his reading of Hartley confirmed him in that view.
What impressed Priestley about Hartley’s defence of the doctrine is
that he too arrived at it contrary to his previous disposition and that
he was a Christian, whereas Collins was reputedly an unbeliever and
one of the most daunting challengers of the evidence for Christian
revelation. For Priestley, unlike Hartley, however, the adoption of the
doctrine of necessity preceded that of the association of ideas.
If Priestley was a convinced necessitarian in the 1750s, he did not
commit himself to materialism until the 1770s. Once again he found
himself rejecting a conventional orthodoxy, the dualism of matter and
spirit, he had previously accepted. He embraced materialism gingerly
at first and then with full commitment in a string of publications that
mostly appeared while he was in the employ of Lord Shelburne as his
librarian. The high water mark of this commitment was the publication
of Disquisitions relating to Matter and Spirit (1777), which with
its annex, the Doctrine of Philosophical Necessity Illustrated, is his most
significant philosophical work. He openly entertained materialism
in the introductory essays to his edition of Hartley’s Theory of the
HumanMind (1775) and had broadly suggested it in his Examination
of Reid’s Inquiry (1774). Hartley was no materialist, but Priestley
found materialism to be a natural development from his account of
the human mind.17 The strength of his commitment to materialism
owed a great deal to the close attention he paid to the doctrine following
the ferocious criticism to which he was subjected on simply
entertaining it in print.18 He was not a man to back down in the face
of attack."