ABSTRACT
The Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity and Chance, the debate about free will between Thomas Hobbes and John Bramhall, saw Hobbes playing two roles. In denying freedom of will, he presented himself as a defender of Protestantism. But he also proposed a naturalizing view of human action and responsibility. How could Hobbes combine these two stances? This chapter argues that debates between Protestants and Catholics about human freedom, as well as within each confession, assumed a shared metaphysics of liberum arbitrium as a power of self-determination exercised over decisions of the will. The controversy was about how to understand the power that the operation of liberum arbitrium involved, about whether contingency was essential to its operation and to humans being governed by law and obligation, and about the possibility of contingency in nature apart from liberum arbitrium. Hobbes rejected this shared metaphysics, denying not only contingency in nature but the very possibility of self-determination. He sought to defend Reformation accounts of responsibility by replacing Protestant scholasticism with a better metaphysics.
