Creation, Divine Freedom, and Catharine Cockburn

This chapter argues that Catharine Cockburn occupies an original and unique position in the debate surrounding God’s freedom and the intellectualist/voluntarist dispute. While she advances an intellectualist position—according to which God knows what is morally right, and his will is constrained to create within the confines of his knowledge—for Cockburn, God nonetheless enjoys a broad range of options. This position is defended by looking at Cockburn’s reaction to arguments made by Edmund Law and her relation to positions advocated in the Leibniz–Clarke correspondence. Special attention is paid to the role that possible worlds play in Cockburn’s arguments, as well as to the conception of the contingency of laws (both moral and natural), which is at play in Cockburn’s work.