Concept

Necessitarianism

Overview

Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be.

It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny libertarian free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or internal antecedents. Necessitarianism is stronger than hard determinism, because even the hard determinist would grant that the causal chain constituting the world might have been different as a whole, even though each member of that series could not have been different, given its antecedent causes.

The most famous defender of necessitarianism in the history of philosophy is Spinoza.

Anthony Collins was also known for his defense of necessitarianism. His brief Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1715) was a key statement of the necessitarianist standpoint.

The Century Dictionary defined it in 1889–91 as belief that the will is not free, but instead subject to external antecedent causes or natural laws of cause and effect.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

Possible passages

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The will, regarded as the faculty of desire, is (in this view) one of the many natural causes in the world, viz. that cause which acts in accordance with concepts. All that is represented as possible (or necessary) by means of a will is called practically possible (or necessary); as distinguished from the physical possibility or necessity of an effect, whose cause is not determined to causality by concepts (but in…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Necessitarianism is.
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In that case, that instantaneous state of things from which every other state of things is calculable consists in the positions and velocities of all the particles at any instant. This, the usual and most logical form of necessitarianism, is called the mechanical philosophy. When I have asked thinking men what reason they had to believe that every fact in the universe is precisely determined by law, the first answer…
Charles S. Peirce, Chance, Love, and Logic
States what Necessitarianism is; names Necessitarianism.
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Now the power and resolved purpose to resist a strong but unjust opponent is called fortitude (fortitudo), and when concerned with the opponent of the moral character within us, it is virtue (virtus, fortitudo moralis). Accordingly, general deontology, in that part which brings not external, but internal, freedom under laws is the doctrine of virtue. {INTRODUCTION ^paragraph 10} Jurisprudence had to do only with the…
Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics
States what Necessitarianism is.
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Philosophers who discussed Necessitarianism

Anthony Collins (philosopher)

Related ideas

Place in the tradition

Part of British philosophy.

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