What Thomas Hobbes has to say of th

What Thomas Hobbes has to say of the nature of causation itself in Entire Causes and Their Only Possible Effects is carried further in the first of the two excerpts here -- although not at its start. His second subject in this imperfectly sequential piece of writing is determinism itself -- a deterministic philosophy of mind. In the mind, as elsewhere, each event has a 'necessary cause' -- a cause that necessitates the event. His third subject in the first excerpt is freedom, this being voluntariness, and its relation to the determinism. He gives a statement of what is now known as Compatibilism -- roughly the doctrine that determinism and freedom properly understood do not conflict with but are consistent with one another. We can be entirely subject to determinism or 'necessity' and also be perfectly free. Certainly a distinction between freedom as 'the absence of opposition', which can co-exist with determinism, and some other kind of freedom, had been made before Hobbes. But it will take a better historian than me to say if he was anticipated by someone else who said that the particular freedom consistent with determinism is all that we can properly mean by the term 'freedom'. Certainly he got in ahead of lovely Hume, who often seems to be given the credit. The second excerpt is an uncluttered statement of his Compatibilism.