Meaning

A person who believes that human beings have free will..

Definitions by Sense

1. A person who believes that human beings have free will.
2. A person who exercises free will.
3. (historical, Protestantism, derogatory) A person belonging to a sect that rejected the doctrine of predestination.
4. (historical, US) An immigrant to the United States who, upon arrival, voluntarily became an indentured servant.

Example Sentences

2006, John Taylor: The Mind: A User’s Manual, Chichester: John Wiley, Part 3, Chapter 18, p. 205, Causality and determinism, in a quantum framework, persist down to the very shortest distances that experiments have been performed in high-energy particle accelerators. I see no way that a person could employ forces above (or even approximately near) what are achieved in those gigantic particle machines to achieve the dream of the free willers: uncaused processes.

[…] most of us are “free-willers.” We automatically assume we can shape the future, including our technology, in almost any fashion we wish, at least within the constraints of the natural environment. A small but vocal school of determinists, however, argues that we delude ourselves.

Here's the challenge to a free willer: Find me the neuron that started this process in this man's brain, the neuron that had an action potential for no reason, where no neuron spoke to it just before.

1847, Ralph Waldo Emerson, journal entry dated May 1847, in Stephen E. Whicher (ed.), Selections from Ralph Waldo Emerson: An Organic Anthology, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957, p. 310, The Americans are free-willers, fussy, self-asserting, buzzing all round creation.

[…] the saviour is no longer the volition of the full-grown spirit of Man, the Free Willer of Necessity, sword in hand, but simply Love […]

1614, John Robinson, Of Religious Communion Private, & Publique, “Of the Baptism of Infants,” p. 96[a], Since all are by nature alike children of wrath, I would know of these free-willers, how some become the children of God, & beleevers, & some abyde vnder the wrath of God?

1675, Richard Baxter, Richard Baxter’s Catholick Theologie, London: Nevill Simmons, “Of Natural Corruption and Impotency, and Free-will,” The third Crimination, p. 125, And is it not then a horrid shame, to hear honest people so seduced into Love-killing factious sidings by their Teachers, as that Boys and Women speak of wiser and better persons with disaffection and reproach, saying, O he is a Free-willer, or he holdeth Free-will, when they know not what they talk of: but are made believe that it is some monstrous impious Opinion, making a man almost an Heretick?

1779, Isaac Watts, undated letter to Enoch Watts, in Posthumous Works, London: T. Becket and J. Bew, Volume 2, p. 153, There was one Pelagius of old, that invented several opinions about free-will, and against free-grace, those that followed him strictly were called Pelagians; those that allowed more to free-grace were called Semi-Pelagians, almost the same with modern Armenians, called also Remonstrants, and by the common people Free-willers. Their notions are, that God elects none to salvation but on the account of that faith he foresees in them.

Word Forms

• free-willers
• free willer

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