A Study Of Thomas Reid On Free Will

The issue of free will has always been one of the most important issues in the history of philosophy,especially in modern philosophy.Thomas Reid,as a Scottish philosopher in the 18 th century,developed his philosophy theory with Hume’s skepticism as an opportunity,put forward a general philosophy with complete context,and became the most important philosopher in the Scottish school of common sense.As one of the modern philosophers,Reid also paid attention to the issue of free will.Based on common sense beliefs and against the background of David Hume’s theory of compatibility,Reid discussed the issue of free will in Essays on the Active Powers of Man.In Hume’s view,necessity and liberty are compatible.The necessity of human action is embodied in the connection between behavior and the actor’s own disposition or motivation.Liberty is not a denial of this.On the contrary,liberty recognizes the connection and relies on it.When we say that a person is free,we are saying that the behavior of this person is due to his own disposition or motivation,that is,out of his own will.Reid rejected Hume’s view of compatibility,pointing out that real liberty is relative to necessity.If one’s action is free,then his action cannot be subject to external compulsion,and cannot be subject to various internal states of intention.In this way,compared with Hume’s liberty of action,Reid proposed a free choice beyond the will decision.Under this theory of freedom,the actor still faces at least two choices at the moment when the will decision takes place,and the choice and control ability of actors are completely hold on himself.This is Reid’s theory of Agent Causation.The basic premise of this theory is Reid’s overview of ‘active power’.It is precisely because Reid interprets human ability as containing the dual meanings of ‘can’ and ‘can not’.With dual meanings,it is possible for the actor to have real freedom,because the real free behavior not only reflects the will of a person,but also has the ability to choose when faced with his will.If a person who claims to have freedom cannot choose not to do something when facing the choice,but is determined by the will of desire and motivation,then the person is not free.However,the argument that Reid’s theory of free will is often questioned lies in this,that is,Reid and other agent causationists adopt the way of answering questions by definition in the face of ‘how actors act as the cause of events’.It seems that the theory of Agent Causation cannot explain clearly the actor’s control over the behavior,which makes the behavior fall into randomness or contingency.