Title: Predeterminism - Wikipedia
Headings: Predeterminism
Predeterminism
Contents
Definitional difficulties
R. E. Hobart
Philippa Foot
References
External links

Content: Hobart (Miller) criticized the core idea of James' The Will to Believe, namely that it was acceptable to hold religious faith in the absence of evidence for or against that faith. James referred to Miller as "my most penetrating critic and intimate enemy." Nearly 25 years after James' death, R. E. Hobart published a short article in Mind in 1934 that is considered one of the definitive statements of determinism and compatibilism. It was entitled Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It. Hobart's compatibilism was similar to earlier landmark positions by Thomas Hobbes and David Hume, as refined in the 19th-century compatibilist views of John Stuart Mill, Henry Sidgwick, and F. H. Bradley. But unlike them Hobart explicitly did not endorse strict logical or physical determinism, and he explicitly did endorse the existence of alternative possibilities, which can depend on absolute chance . He was writing just a few years after the discovery of quantum mechanics and indeterminacy, and also makes passing mention of the ancient "swerve" of the atoms espoused by Epicurus : 'I am not maintaining that determinism is true...it is not here affirmed that there are no small exceptions, no slight undetermined swervings, no ingredient of absolute chance.' '"We say," I can will this or I can will that, whichever I choose". Two courses of action present themselves to my mind.