Freedom and Necessity in William Godwin’s Philosophy of Education

Dr Graham Nutbrown. Visiting Lecturer, University of Bath (Speaker)
Dr Eri Mountbatten-O’Malley (co-Chair)/ Dr Jim Hordern (co-Chair)

William Godwin (1756 – 1836) was briefly celebrated as the most influential English thinker of the age. Today he is most often referenced as the husband of Mary Wollstonecraft, the father of Mary Shelley, and the founding father of philosophical anarchism. He deserves to be remembered also as a significant philosopher of education.

The notion of independent private judgement is central to Godwin’s thoughts about education and to his political epistemology. Yet he insists that our choices are constrained by the necessary laws of nature. My focus will be on his version of necessitarianism – what we would nowadays call Hard Determinism, the idea that free will is an illusion. I ask to what extent this idea is compatible with independent private judgment and with the idea that education and freedom are linked as both the means and end of political justice. Does more education really make us freer? At the end of the talk, I will speculate, as Godwin himself does, on the future achievements of science and technology. Do we really want a complete understanding of our psychophysical mechanisms? Isn’t this just the kind of knowledge that Mary Shelley warned against in Frankenstein?

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Refreshments and snacks provided courtesy of PESGB Bath & Bristol Branch