Document Type
Book Chapter
Publication Date
1999
Department 1
Civil War Era Studies
Department 2
History
Abstract
If certain national cultures seem to own certain great problems of the mind, then freedom of the will seems to be the American problem. This is not just because of the sheet stupifying bulk of what Americans have written on this problem over the past 300 years, from Benjamin Franklin to Daniel Dennett, from Quaker prophetesses in Vermont to prairie lawyers in Illinois. In the most fundamental sense, freedom of the will has been an American possession because it forms a cognate philosophical discourse to that most fundamental of all American ideas, that if political and civil liberty. To speak of liberty in the public sphere is, necessarily, to make a judgment about the capacity of people for choice in the most highly personal sense as well; the extent of those capacities for choice is, in philosophical terms, what a discussion of freedom of the will is all about. [excerpt]
Copyright Note
This is the publisher's version of the work. This publication appears in Gettysburg College's institutional repository by permission of the copyright owner for personal use, not for redistribution.
Recommended Citation
Guelzo, Allen C. "The Return of the Will: Jonathan Edwards and the Possibilities of Free Will." Edwards in Our Time: Jonathan Edwards and the Shaping of American Religion. Eds. Sang Hyun Lee and Allen C. Guelzo (Grand Rapids, MI: Wm Eerdmans Publishing, 1999), 87-110.
Required Publisher's Statement
Original version is available from the publisher at: http://www.eerdmans.com/