ABSTRACT
All of the most important seventeenth century philosophers addressed the nature of freedom, as well as the perennial question of how freedom relates to determinism. The Anglican cleric John Bramhall believes that God has the power to determine the human will to a specific act, and does so on rare occasions to control particular human decisions. Bramhall's denial of theological determinism allows him to construct a free-will theodicy against the problem of evil. Thomas Hobbes's determinism is at the same time both natural and theological. Rene Descartes believes that deterministic laws of nature govern the motions of bodies, including the human body. According to Benedict de Spinoza, a free thing "exists solely from the necessity of its own nature, and is determined to action by itself alone". Free actions, for Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, are causally determined in some sense. Nevertheless, in Leibniz's view, certain forms of determinism would destroy freedom.
