Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • Relating to necessarianism; necessitarian.
  • noun One who accepts the doctrine of necessarianism; a necessitarian.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun An advocate of the doctrine of philosophical necessity; a necessitarian.
  • adjective Of or pertaining to necessarianism.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun philosophy, theology An adherent of necessarianism, an advocate of the doctrine of necessity.

Etymologies

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Examples

  • In taking this part, it does not follow that we are to repudiate, as totally without foundation, the philosophy and the metaphysics of the necessarian -- _aequo pretio aestimentur_.

    On Calvinism William Hull

  • But until we can detect the fallacies of the metaphysician, or supply the _connecting link_ which is now wanting, we must rest in the unsatisfactory conclusion that abstract philosophy is with the necessarian, and that liberty and its ennobling consequences, moral agency, and moral responsibility, rest on the solitary basis of moral argument.

    On Calvinism William Hull

  • But the philosophical necessarian does not grant this postulate.

    On Calvinism William Hull

  • It was a fashion of the age to treat philosophy with mathematical rigour; but very different was the "geometrical ethics" of Spinoza, the necessarian, from that of Descartes, the libertarian, who thought that God's free will chose even the ultimate reasons of right and wrong and might have chosen otherwise.

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 4: Clandestinity-Diocesan Chancery 1840-1916 1913

  • In our historical sketch we have found Spinoza a necessarian or fatalist; but he believed in effort and exhortation as aids to good life.

    The Catholic Encyclopedia, Volume 4: Clandestinity-Diocesan Chancery 1840-1916 1913

  • God, and work down from above, the necessarian position is determined.

    Spiritual Reformers in the 16th & 17th Centuries Rufus Matthew Jones 1905

  • I admit now that they are necessary, in the sense of the necessarian, but I can see little use for them, unless the production of Illusion (with few or many gaps in it) is needed for the world's progress.

    A Tramp's Notebook Morley Roberts 1899

  • If Holbach and others who hold necessarian opinions were to perceive this more frankly, and to work it out fully, they would prevent a confusion that is very unfavourable to them in the minds of most of those whom they wish to persuade.

    Diderot and the Encyclopædists Volume II. John Morley 1880

  • What they really have to do, if they would upset the necessarian argument, is to prove that they are free to associate any emotion whatever with any idea whatever; to like pain as much as pleasure; vice as much as virtue; in short, to prove, that, whatever may be the fixity of order of the universe of things, that of thought is given over to chance.

    Hume (English Men of Letters Series) Thomas Henry Huxley 1860

  • To the statement of another consequence of the necessarian doctrine, that, if there be a God, he must be the cause of all evil as well as of all good, Hume gives no real reply -- probably because none is possible.

    Hume (English Men of Letters Series) Thomas Henry Huxley 1860

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