Edwards believed in the Calvinist doctrine of predestination, not in causal determinism, which is what I am sure Joanne and I know Hume and Nietzsche, advocate. The following links are useful in making the distinction:
http://www.ovrlnd.com/Apologetics/Determinism.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Predestination
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has the following good pieces on compatibilism and causal determinism:
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/supplement.html
The author reminded me that Hobbes, not Hume, is probably the first modern compatibilist.
--- Carrol Cox <cbcox at ilstu.edu> wrote:
>
>
> andie nachgeborenen wrote:
> >
> > One name for the position is "compatibilism," and
> it's
> > a pretty standard view held by a wide variety of
> > thinkers. Hume was probably the first person to
> > formulate the position in anything like a modern
> form.
>
> It's been over 50 years since I read this, but I
> think Jonathan Edwards
> claimed that we were responsible only if we were
> _not_ free; if we were
> free than every act was by a different person and we
> could not be held
> responsible for it; but if we were not free, then
> our acts represented
> what we really were and we were respnsible.
>
> Carrol
>
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