Paul Holbach's The Illusion Of Free Will And Determinism?

Paul Holbach, his full name Paul Henri Thiry, Baron d’Holbach, was a French author, philosopher, encyclopedist, and atheist who lived from 1723 to 1789 and a famous figure from the French enlightenment. In Holbach's most famous book called System of Nature, he lays out his views on the topic of free will and determinism in a section titled “The Illusion of Free Will”. In it Holbach writes, “[Man] is connected to universal nature, and submitted to the necessary and immutable laws that she imposes on all beings she contains…” (Holbach 438). Holbach essentially claims that all physical objects act according to the necessary and immutable laws of nature. Those “necessary and immutable laws of nature” he mentions are are the natural laws which are impossible to break or change, such as gravity and so forth. And if man is a physical object, therefore man must act according to those necessary and immutable laws of nature, Holbach writes this to give foundation to future arguments supporting his position. Holbach is a staunch supporter of determinism, and his beliefs are in complete opposition to free will. In order to evaluate …show more content…
However, Ayer’s definition directly challenges Holbach's foundation for his arguments. Ayer splits necessity into two different types: Logical and causal necessity. Logical being deductive. as finding something to be true by definition, and causal being inductive, by finding something to be true by correlation. Ayer’s redefining of necessity immediately weakens the base of his arguments, Ayer argues that the laws of nature are causal and not logical, and for to think it to be logical would “suggest that one event is somehow in the power of another, whereas the truth is merely that they are factually correlated.” (Ayer