Aside from his solution, which is marked by an extreme
necessitarianism, the letter shows the evolution of Leibniz's thought.
In particular, we will focus on the following infelicities: his acceptance of demographic
necessitarianism, his mischaracterizations of Aboriginal nationalism, his critique of Aboriginal rights claims, and his failed attempt to resurrect the concept of citizens plus.
The two sides of the paradox come together much as in Wallace Stevens's affirmation, "to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else."(35) The intellectual changes that allowed Adams to escape from
necessitarianism and to discard the ideological side of his anti-Semitism ultimately required a reframing of belief, a redirection of will.
The latter thesis is crucial for understanding the development of voluntaristic theories in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, insofar as it was taken by the advocates of such theories to embody a form of moral "
necessitarianism" that was too restrictive of the power of the will.
The first (Why is there something rather than nothing?) leads to an exploration of
necessitarianism. Conee includes both 'Godly' and 'Un-Godly' necessitarian arguments and explains how and why they fail.
The strength of this literary history is its perception that we can't subject the religious matter of Wordsworth's poems to single metaphysical readings--for example, his influence by Hartley's Associationism, Godwin's
Necessitarianism, or Coleridge's One Life.
(282) Such
necessitarianism is, in Bourdieu's terms, "doxa," a belief structure that so closely dovetails with common sense that it seems absurd to even question it.
Gilson speaks in this connection of "Greek
necessitarianism": the "Aristotelian identification of reality, intelligibility, and necessity, not only in things, but first and above all in God."(37) The condemnations had a profound and chilling effect on Christian intellectual life.
Surely the greatest English philosopher of the Victorian age deserves better than such obtuse simplicity: Priestley had made clear the distinction between "
necessitarianism" and "fatalism" a century earlier.
The paper aims first to establish that Avicenna deserves a position of prominence in histories of the PSR ([section] 1), and then to consider how he addresses certain challenges to the PSR, especially the threat posed by
necessitarianism ([section] 11).
The second part of Obserpations on Man reconciled that metaphysics with traditional Christianity; Priesttey's discussions of Necessity, especially Illustrations of Philosophical Necessity, then reconciled Hartley's Christian
Necessitarianism with Unitarian theology--to the end that Necessity was conceived as an encompassing principle of orderly causation.
