Free will in antiquity
Encyclopedia
Free will in antiquity was not discussed in the same terms as used in the modern free will
debates, but historians of the problem have speculated who exactly was first to take positions as determinist
, libertarian
, and compatibilist in antiquity. There is wide agreement that these views were essentially fully formed over 2000 years ago.
Candidates for the first thinkers to form these views, as well as the idea of a non-physical "agent-causal" libertarianism, include Democritus
(460-370), Aristotle
(384-322), Epicurus
(341-270), Chrysippus
(280-207), and Carneades
(214-129).
Descriptions of ancient thinkers and their positions is adapted from Free Will in Antiquity, whose content is available under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons license.
Before there was anything called philosophy, religious accounts of man's fate explored the degree of human freedom permitted by superhuman gods. Creation myths often end in adventures of the first humans making choices and being held responsible. But a strong fatalism is present in those tales that foretell the future, based on the idea that the gods have foreknowledge of future events. Anxious not to annoy the gods, the myth-makers rarely challenged the implausible view that the gods' foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. This was an early form of today's compatibilism
, the idea that causal determinism and logical necessity are compatible with free will.
The first thinkers to look for explanatory causes (ἀιτία) in natural phenomena (rather than gods controlling events) were the Greek physiologoi or cosmologists. The reasons or rules (λόγοι) behind the physical (φύσις) world became the ideal "laws" governing material phenomena. The first cosmologist was Anaximander (610-546), who coined the term physis (φύσις) and perhaps even the cosmological combination of cosmos (κόσμος), as organized nature, and logos (λόγοσ), as the law behind nature. The Greeks had a separate word for the laws (or conventions) of society, nomos (νόμος).
Heraclitus
(535-475) claimed that everything changes ("you can't step twice into the same river") but that there were laws or rules (the logos) behind all the change. The early cosmologists' intuition that their laws could produce an ordered cosmos out of chaos was prescient. Our current model of the universe begins with a state of minimal information and maximum disorder. Early cosmologists imagined that the universal laws were all-powerful and must therefore explain the natural causes behind all things, from the regular motions of the heavens to the mind (νοῦς) of man.
The physiologoi transformed pre-philosophical arguments about gods controlling the human will into arguments about pre-existing causes controlling it. The cosmological problem became a psychological problem. Some saw a causal chain
of events leading back to a first cause (later taken by many religious thinkers to be God). Other physiologoi held that although all physical events are caused, mental events might not be. This is mind/body dualism, perhaps the most important of all great dualisms. If the mind (or soul) is a substance different from matter, it could have its own laws different from the laws of nature for material bodies, and agents might originate new causal chains.
and his mentor Leucippus
were the first determinists. With extraordinary prescience, they claimed that all things, including humans, were made of atoms in a void, with individual atomic motions strictly controlled by causal laws. Democritus said:
Democritus wanted to wrest control of man's fate from arbitrary gods and make us more responsible for our actions. But ironically, he and Leucippus originated two of the great dogmas of determinism, physical determinism and logical necessity, which lead directly to the traditional and modern problem of free will and determinism.
Leucippus dogmatically declared an absolute necessity which left no room in the cosmos for chance.
The consequence is a world with but one possible future, completely determined by its past. Some even argued for a great cycle of events (an idea borrowed from Middle Eastern sources) repeating themselves over thousands of years.
The Pythagoreans, Socrates
, and Plato
attempted to reconcile an element of human freedom with material determinism and causal law, in order to hold man responsible for his actions.
. First he described a causal chain back to a prime mover or first cause, and he elaborated the four possible causes (material, efficient, formal, and final). Aristotle's word for these causes was ἀιτία, which translates as causes in the sense of the multiple factors responsible for an event. Aristotle did not subscribe to the simplistic "every event has a (single) cause" idea that was to come later.
Then, in his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle also said there were "accidents" caused by "chance (τυχή)." In his Physics, he clearly reckoned chance among the causes. Aristotle might have added chance as a fifth cause - an uncaused or self-caused cause - one he thought happens when two causal chains come together by accident (συμβεβεκός). He noted that the early physicists had found no place for chance among their causes.
Aristotle opposed his accidental chance to necessity:
Tracing any particular sequence of events back in time will usually come to an accidental event - a "starting point" or "fresh start" (Aristotle calls it an origin or arche (ἀρχῆ) - whose major contributing cause (or causes) was itself uncaused, e.g., it involved quantum indeterminacy
.
Whether a particular thing happens, says Aristotle, may depend on a series of causes that
In general, many such causal sequences contribute to any event, including human decisions. Each sequence has a different time of origin, some going back before we were born, some originating during our deliberations.
Beyond causal sequences that are the result of chance or necessity, Aristotle felt that some breaks in the causal chain allow us to feel our actions "depend on us" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν). These are the causal chains that originate within us (ἐv ἡμῖν).
Aristotle knew that many of our decisions are quite predictable based on habit and character, but they are no less free nor we less responsible if our character itself and predictable habits were developed freely in the past and are changeable in the future.
This is the view of some Eastern philosophies and religions. Our Karma
(etymologically one's character) has been determined by past actions (even from past lives), and strongly influences our current actions, but we are free to improve our Karma by good actions.
argued that as atoms moved through the void, there were occasions when they would "swerve" from their otherwise determined paths, thus initiating new causal chains. Epicurus argued that these swerves would allow us to be more responsible for our actions, something impossible if every action was deterministically caused. For Epicurus, the occasional interventions of arbitrary gods would be preferable to strict determinism.
Epicurus did not say the swerve was directly involved in decisions. His critics, ancient and modern, have claimed mistakenly that Epicurus did assume "one swerve - one decision" and that "free " actions are uncaused.
But following Aristotle, Epicurus thought human agents have the autonomous ability to transcend necessity and chance (both of which destroy responsibility), so that praise and blame are appropriate.
Clearly following Aristotle, Epicurus finds a tertium quid, beyond necessity (Democritus' physics) and beyond chance. His tertium quid is agent autonomy, what is "up to us."
Parenthetically, we now know that atoms do not occasionally swerve, they move unpredictably whenever they are in close contact with other atoms. Everything in the material universe is made of atoms in unstoppable perpetual motion. Deterministic paths are only the case for very large objects, where the statistical laws of atomic physics average to become nearly certain dynamical laws for billiard balls and planets.
So Epicurus' intuition of a fundamental randomness in nature was correct. And he agreed with Aristotle that there is another basic kind of causes beyond necessity (άνάyκη) and chance (τυχῆ). They both said our actions are "up to us" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν or παρ’ ῆμᾶς). How exactly determinism and chance relate to autonomous agent causality is not made clear by either of them, and it remains a challenge for theories of free will.
We know Epicurus' work largely from the Roman Lucretius
and Lucretius's friend Cicero
.
Lucretius, a strong supporter of Epicurus, saw the randomness as enabling free will, even if he could not explain exactly how, beyond the fact that random swerves would break the causal chain of determinism.
Lucretius' "first beginning" (primordia motus principium) seems to be a reference to Aristotle's "fresh start" (ἀρχῆ)) and a kind of causa sui that would start additional new causal chains under the control of the mind ("just where our mind has taken us").
The Latin original libera in "whence comes this freedom" has often been translated as "free will," influenced perhaps by the centuries-old free will debate.
But Lucretius himself clearly distinguishes the "free" (libera) from the "will" (voluntas).
Cicero, although a severe critic of Epicurus and disturbed by the idea of anything random, unequivocally denies fate, strict causal determinism, and God's foreknowledge.
Although he defends human freedom, Cicero ridicules the presumptive Epicurean idea of a chance swerve as the direct cause of our decisions. (Note that Epicurus did not involve chance in decisions that are "up to us." For him chance simply breaks the chain of causal determinism.) Cicero's implication has created the mistaken notion that for libertarians, chance must be the direct cause of action. (Some free willists, notably Robert Kane
and his followers, do include chance directly in the decision.)
It was the Stoic school of philosophy
that solidified the idea of natural laws controlling all things, including the mind. Zeno of Citium
, the original founder of Stoicism, had a very simplistic but powerful idea of the causal chain compared to Aristotle.
Zeno said that every event has a cause, and that cause necessitates the event. Given exactly the same circumstances, exactly the same result will occur.
The Stoic influence persists to this day, in philosophy and religion. Most of the extensive Stoic writings are lost, probably because their doctrine of fate, which identified God with Nature, was considered anathema to the Christian church. The church agreed that the laws of God were the laws of Nature, but that God and Nature were two different entities. In either case strict determinism follows by universal Reason (logos) from an omnipotent God. Stoic virtue called for men to resist futile passions like anger and envy. The fine Stoic morality that all men (including slaves and women) were equal children of God coincided with (or was adopted by) the church. Stoic logic and physics freed those fields from ancient superstitions, but strengthened the dogmas of determinism that dominate modern science and philosophy, especially when they explicitly denied Aristotle's chance as a possible cause.
, took the edge off strict necessity. Like Democritus, Aristotle, and Epicurus before him, he wanted to strengthen the argument for moral responsibility, in particular defending it from Aristotle's and Epicurus' indeterminate chance causes.
Whereas the past is unchangeable, Chrysippus argued that some future events that are possible do not occur by necessity from past external factors alone, but might (as Aristotle and Epicurus maintained) depend on us. We have a choice to assent or not to assent to an action. This is a controversial idea and may be inconsistent with orthodox Stoic doctrines, since it suggests the existence of alternative possibilities and the capacity to do otherwise.
Chrysippus said our actions are determined (in part by ourselves as causes) and fated (because of God's foreknowledge), but he also said correctly that they are not necessitated, i.e., pre-determined from the distant past. Chrysippus would be seen today as a compatibilist, as was the Stoic Epictetus. He also has a strong element of agent-causalism.
Alexander of Aphrodisias
(c.150-210), the most famous commentator on Aristotle, wrote 500 years after Aristotle's death, at a time when Aristotle and Plato were rather forgotten minor philosophers in the age of Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Alexander defended a view of moral responsibility we would call libertarianism today. Greek philosophy had no precise term for "free will" as did Latin (liberum arbitrium or libera voluntas). The discussion was in terms of responsibility, what "depends on us" (in Greek ἐφ ἡμῖν).
Alexander believed that Aristotle was not a strict determinist like the Stoics, and Alexander himself argued that some events do not have pre-determined causes. In particular, man is responsible for self-caused decisions, and can choose to do or not to do something, as Chrysippus argued. However, Alexander denied the foreknowledge of events that was part of the Stoic identification of God and Nature.
Most of the ancient thinkers recognized the obvious difficulty with chance (or an uncaused cause) as the source of human freedom. Even Aristotle described chance as a "cause obscure to human reason" (ἀιτιάν ἄδελον ἀνθρωπίνᾠ λογισμῶ).
Actions caused by chance are simply random and we cannot feel responsible for them. But we do feel responsible. Despite more than twenty-three centuries of philosophizing, most modern thinkers have not moved significantly beyond this core problem of randomness and free will for libertarians - the confused idea that free actions are caused directly by a random event.
Caught between the horns of a dilemma, with determinism on one side and randomness on the other, the standard argument against free will
continues to render human freedom unintelligible (ἄδελον).
Bailey says clearly that Epicurus did not identify freedom of the will with chance.
Richard Sorabji
Sorabji's 1980 Necessity, Cause, and Blame surveyed Aristotle's positions on causation and necessity, comparing them to his predecessors and successors, especially the Stoics and Epicurus. Sorabji argues that Aristotle was an indeterminist, that real chance and uncaused events exist, but never that human actions are uncaused in the extreme libertarian sense that some commentators mistakenly attribute to Epicurus.
Aristotle accepted the past as fixed, in the sense that past events were irrevocable. But future events cannot be necessitated by claims about the present truth value of statements about the future. Aristotle does not deny the excluded middle (either p or not p), only that the truth value of p does not exist yet. Indeed, although the past is fixed, the truth value of past statements about the future can be changed by the outcome of future events. This is the problem of future contingents.
Sorabji claims that he can separate necessity from causality, with implications for causal determinism. In particular, he defends indeterminists against the charge that libertarian decisions are unintelligible.
Sorabji considers the suggestions that quantum uncertainty disproves determinism, and he finds that Aristotle described "starting points" (ἄρχαι) for new causal chains that resemble probabilistic quantum events.
Finally, although he thinks Aristotle was not aware of the "problem" of free will vis-a-vis determinism (as first described by Epicurus), Sorabji thinks Aristotle's position on the question is clear enough. Voluntariness is too important to fall before theoretical arguments about necessity and determinism.
Sharples thinks that the problem of determinism and responsibility was not realised, in the form in which it was eventually passed on to post-classical thinkers, until relatively late in the history of Greek thought - at least not until after Aristotle.
Here Sharples introduces the mistaken criticism of Epicurus that was first made by Cicero and the Stoics and that he notices continues today.
Sharples describes the first compatibilist arguments to reconcile responsibility and determinism, by Chryssipus
A. A. Long
In their great 1987 work The Hellenistic Philosophers (dedicated to David Furley), Long and Sedley discussed Epicurus and the free will problem at length, with references to the principal original Greek and Latin sources. They agree with Pamela Huby that Epicurus was the first to notice the modern problem of free will and determinism.
Julia Annas
In her 1992 book, The Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Annas finds it hard to see how random swerves can help to explain free action.
Susanne Bobzien
In Bobzien's 1998 book Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy she made a detailed analysis of arguments, especially those of Chrysippus, for the compatibilism of freedom with causal determinism.
In her book and a 1998 article in Phronesis (Vol. 43, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 133–175), Bobzien identified several variations on the theme of human freedom that were important in antiquity. Three of them are indeterminist freedoms, by which she means the decision is partly or wholly a matter of chance, and does not involve the character and values of the agent:
Then in 2000 Bobzien challenged Pamela Huby's 1967 assertion that Epicurus discovered the "free will problem." She did not mention that Long and Sedley shared Huby's view.
Bobzien thinks Epicurus did not have a model of what she calls "two-sided freedom," because she follows Don Fowler, Julia Annas, and Jeffrey Purinton, in believing that Epidurus
Bobzien is of course right that Epicurus did not think that our decisions were made at random with no regard for our character and values, or for our feelings and desires. This is a straw argument put up by critics of Epicurean philosophy, notably the Stoic Chryssipus and the Academic Skeptic Cicero.
But Bobzien is wrong to suggest that Epicurus did not see a problem between human freedom and the causal determinism of his fellow atomist Democritus, and that his atomic swerve was not his proposed solution to that "free will problem." She notes that
Free will
"To make my own decisions whether I am successful or not due to uncontrollable forces" -Troy MorrisonA pragmatic definition of free willFree will is the ability of agents to make choices free from certain kinds of constraints. The existence of free will and its exact nature and definition have long...
debates, but historians of the problem have speculated who exactly was first to take positions as determinist
Determinism
Determinism is the general philosophical thesis that states that for everything that happens there are conditions such that, given them, nothing else could happen. There are many versions of this thesis. Each of them rests upon various alleged connections, and interdependencies of things and...
, libertarian
Libertarianism (metaphysics)
Libertarianism is one of the main philosophical positions related to the problems of free will and determinism, which are part of the larger domain of metaphysics. In particular, libertarianism, which is an incompatibilist position, argues that free will is logically incompatible with a...
, and compatibilist in antiquity. There is wide agreement that these views were essentially fully formed over 2000 years ago.
Candidates for the first thinkers to form these views, as well as the idea of a non-physical "agent-causal" libertarianism, include Democritus
Democritus
Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos....
(460-370), Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
(384-322), Epicurus
Epicurus
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...
(341-270), Chrysippus
Chrysippus
Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a native of Soli, Cilicia, but moved to Athens as a young man, where he became a pupil of Cleanthes in the Stoic school. When Cleanthes died, around 230 BC, Chrysippus became the third head of the school...
(280-207), and Carneades
Carneades
Carneades was an Academic skeptic born in Cyrene. By the year 159 BC, he had started to refute all previous dogmatic doctrines, especially Stoicism, and even the Epicureans whom previous skeptics had spared. As head of the Academy, he was one of three philosophers sent to Rome in 155 BC where his...
(214-129).
Descriptions of ancient thinkers and their positions is adapted from Free Will in Antiquity, whose content is available under a CC-BY-SA 3.0 Creative Commons license.
Fatalism and Foreknowledge
The very first free will "problem" was whether freedom was compatible with intervention and foreknowledge of the gods.Before there was anything called philosophy, religious accounts of man's fate explored the degree of human freedom permitted by superhuman gods. Creation myths often end in adventures of the first humans making choices and being held responsible. But a strong fatalism is present in those tales that foretell the future, based on the idea that the gods have foreknowledge of future events. Anxious not to annoy the gods, the myth-makers rarely challenged the implausible view that the gods' foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom. This was an early form of today's compatibilism
Compatibilism
Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent. It may, however, be more accurate to say that compatibilists define 'free will' in a way that allows it to co-exist with determinism...
, the idea that causal determinism and logical necessity are compatible with free will.
The first thinkers to look for explanatory causes (ἀιτία) in natural phenomena (rather than gods controlling events) were the Greek physiologoi or cosmologists. The reasons or rules (λόγοι) behind the physical (φύσις) world became the ideal "laws" governing material phenomena. The first cosmologist was Anaximander (610-546), who coined the term physis (φύσις) and perhaps even the cosmological combination of cosmos (κόσμος), as organized nature, and logos (λόγοσ), as the law behind nature. The Greeks had a separate word for the laws (or conventions) of society, nomos (νόμος).
Heraclitus
Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom...
(535-475) claimed that everything changes ("you can't step twice into the same river") but that there were laws or rules (the logos) behind all the change. The early cosmologists' intuition that their laws could produce an ordered cosmos out of chaos was prescient. Our current model of the universe begins with a state of minimal information and maximum disorder. Early cosmologists imagined that the universal laws were all-powerful and must therefore explain the natural causes behind all things, from the regular motions of the heavens to the mind (νοῦς) of man.
The physiologoi transformed pre-philosophical arguments about gods controlling the human will into arguments about pre-existing causes controlling it. The cosmological problem became a psychological problem. Some saw a causal chain
Causal chain
In philosophy, a causal chain is an ordered sequence of events in which any one event in the chain causes the next. Some philosophers believe causation relates facts, not events, in which case the meaning is adjusted accordingly.-See also:*Causality*Event...
of events leading back to a first cause (later taken by many religious thinkers to be God). Other physiologoi held that although all physical events are caused, mental events might not be. This is mind/body dualism, perhaps the most important of all great dualisms. If the mind (or soul) is a substance different from matter, it could have its own laws different from the laws of nature for material bodies, and agents might originate new causal chains.
The First Determinist
The materialist philosophers DemocritusDemocritus
Democritus was an Ancient Greek philosopher born in Abdera, Thrace, Greece. He was an influential pre-Socratic philosopher and pupil of Leucippus, who formulated an atomic theory for the cosmos....
and his mentor Leucippus
Leucippus
Leucippus or Leukippos was one of the earliest Greeks to develop the theory of atomism — the idea that everything is composed entirely of various imperishable, indivisible elements called atoms — which was elaborated in greater detail by his pupil and successor, Democritus...
were the first determinists. With extraordinary prescience, they claimed that all things, including humans, were made of atoms in a void, with individual atomic motions strictly controlled by causal laws. Democritus said:
"By convention (nomos) color, by convention sweet, by convention bitter, but in reality atoms and a void."
νόμῳ χροιή, νόμῳ γλυκύ, νόμῳ πικρόν, ἑτεῇ δ’ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν
Democritus wanted to wrest control of man's fate from arbitrary gods and make us more responsible for our actions. But ironically, he and Leucippus originated two of the great dogmas of determinism, physical determinism and logical necessity, which lead directly to the traditional and modern problem of free will and determinism.
Leucippus dogmatically declared an absolute necessity which left no room in the cosmos for chance.
"Nothing occurs at random (maten), but everything for a reason (logos) and by necessity."
οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτηῳ γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης
The consequence is a world with but one possible future, completely determined by its past. Some even argued for a great cycle of events (an idea borrowed from Middle Eastern sources) repeating themselves over thousands of years.
The Pythagoreans, Socrates
Socrates
Socrates was a classical Greek Athenian philosopher. Credited as one of the founders of Western philosophy, he is an enigmatic figure known chiefly through the accounts of later classical writers, especially the writings of his students Plato and Xenophon, and the plays of his contemporary ...
, and Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
attempted to reconcile an element of human freedom with material determinism and causal law, in order to hold man responsible for his actions.
The First Indeterminist
The first major philosopher to argue convincingly for some indeterminism was probably AristotleAristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...
. First he described a causal chain back to a prime mover or first cause, and he elaborated the four possible causes (material, efficient, formal, and final). Aristotle's word for these causes was ἀιτία, which translates as causes in the sense of the multiple factors responsible for an event. Aristotle did not subscribe to the simplistic "every event has a (single) cause" idea that was to come later.
Then, in his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle also said there were "accidents" caused by "chance (τυχή)." In his Physics, he clearly reckoned chance among the causes. Aristotle might have added chance as a fifth cause - an uncaused or self-caused cause - one he thought happens when two causal chains come together by accident (συμβεβεκός). He noted that the early physicists had found no place for chance among their causes.
Aristotle opposed his accidental chance to necessity:
Nor is there any definite cause for an accident, but only chance (τυχόν), namely an indefinite (ἀόριστον) cause.
(Metaphysics, Book V, 1025a25)2a
It is obvious that there are principles and causes which are generable and destructible apart from the actual processes of generation and destruction; for if this is not true, everything will be of necessity: that is, if there must necessarily be some cause, other than accidental, of that which is generated and destroyed. Will this be, or not? Yes, if this happens; otherwise not.
Tracing any particular sequence of events back in time will usually come to an accidental event - a "starting point" or "fresh start" (Aristotle calls it an origin or arche (ἀρχῆ) - whose major contributing cause (or causes) was itself uncaused, e.g., it involved quantum indeterminacy
Quantum indeterminacy
Quantum indeterminacy is the apparent necessary incompleteness in the description of a physical system, that has become one of the characteristics of the standard description of quantum physics...
.
Whether a particular thing happens, says Aristotle, may depend on a series of causes that
goes back to some starting-point, which does not go back to something else. This, therefore, will be the starting-point of the fortuitous, and nothing else is the cause of its generation.
In general, many such causal sequences contribute to any event, including human decisions. Each sequence has a different time of origin, some going back before we were born, some originating during our deliberations.
Beyond causal sequences that are the result of chance or necessity, Aristotle felt that some breaks in the causal chain allow us to feel our actions "depend on us" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν). These are the causal chains that originate within us (ἐv ἡμῖν).
Aristotle knew that many of our decisions are quite predictable based on habit and character, but they are no less free nor we less responsible if our character itself and predictable habits were developed freely in the past and are changeable in the future.
This is the view of some Eastern philosophies and religions. Our Karma
Karma
Karma in Indian religions is the concept of "action" or "deed", understood as that which causes the entire cycle of cause and effect originating in ancient India and treated in Hindu, Jain, Buddhist and Sikh philosophies....
(etymologically one's character) has been determined by past actions (even from past lives), and strongly influences our current actions, but we are free to improve our Karma by good actions.
The First Libertarian Incompatibilist
One generation after Aristotle, EpicurusEpicurus
Epicurus was an ancient Greek philosopher and the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism.Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works...
argued that as atoms moved through the void, there were occasions when they would "swerve" from their otherwise determined paths, thus initiating new causal chains. Epicurus argued that these swerves would allow us to be more responsible for our actions, something impossible if every action was deterministically caused. For Epicurus, the occasional interventions of arbitrary gods would be preferable to strict determinism.
Epicurus did not say the swerve was directly involved in decisions. His critics, ancient and modern, have claimed mistakenly that Epicurus did assume "one swerve - one decision" and that "free " actions are uncaused.
But following Aristotle, Epicurus thought human agents have the autonomous ability to transcend necessity and chance (both of which destroy responsibility), so that praise and blame are appropriate.
Clearly following Aristotle, Epicurus finds a tertium quid, beyond necessity (Democritus' physics) and beyond chance. His tertium quid is agent autonomy, what is "up to us."
...some things happen of necessity (ἀνάγκη), others by chance (τύχη), others through our own agency (παρ’ ἡμᾶς).
...necessity destroys responsibility and chance is inconstant; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach.
λέγει ἐν ἄλλοις γίνεσθαι ἃ μὲν κατ’ ἀνάγκην, ἃ δὲ ἀπὸ τύχης, ἃ δὲ παρ’ ἡμᾶς, διὰ τὸ τὴν μὲν ἀνάγκην ἀνυπεύθυνον εἶναι, τὴν δὲ τύχην ἄστατον ὁρᾶν, τὸ δὲ παρ’ ἡμᾶς ἀδέσποτον, ᾧ καὶ τὸ μεμπτὸν καὶ τὸ ἐναντίον παρακολουθεῖν πέφυκεν
Parenthetically, we now know that atoms do not occasionally swerve, they move unpredictably whenever they are in close contact with other atoms. Everything in the material universe is made of atoms in unstoppable perpetual motion. Deterministic paths are only the case for very large objects, where the statistical laws of atomic physics average to become nearly certain dynamical laws for billiard balls and planets.
So Epicurus' intuition of a fundamental randomness in nature was correct. And he agreed with Aristotle that there is another basic kind of causes beyond necessity (άνάyκη) and chance (τυχῆ). They both said our actions are "up to us" (ἐφ' ἡμῖν or παρ’ ῆμᾶς). How exactly determinism and chance relate to autonomous agent causality is not made clear by either of them, and it remains a challenge for theories of free will.
We know Epicurus' work largely from the Roman Lucretius
Lucretius
Titus Lucretius Carus was a Roman poet and philosopher. His only known work is an epic philosophical poem laying out the beliefs of Epicureanism, De rerum natura, translated into English as On the Nature of Things or "On the Nature of the Universe".Virtually no details have come down concerning...
and Lucretius's friend Cicero
Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero , was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, political theorist, and Roman constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.He introduced the Romans to the chief...
.
Lucretius, a strong supporter of Epicurus, saw the randomness as enabling free will, even if he could not explain exactly how, beyond the fact that random swerves would break the causal chain of determinism.
Again, if all motion is always one long chain, and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable, and if the first-beginnings do not make by swerving a beginning of motion such as to break the decrees of fate, that cause may not follow cause from infinity, whence comes this freedom (libera) in living creatures all over the earth, whence I say is this will (voluntas) wrested from the fates by which we proceed whither pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us? For undoubtedly it is his own will in each that begins these things, and from the will movements go rippling through the limbs.
Lucretius' "first beginning" (primordia motus principium) seems to be a reference to Aristotle's "fresh start" (ἀρχῆ)) and a kind of causa sui that would start additional new causal chains under the control of the mind ("just where our mind has taken us").
The Latin original libera in "whence comes this freedom" has often been translated as "free will," influenced perhaps by the centuries-old free will debate.
But Lucretius himself clearly distinguishes the "free" (libera) from the "will" (voluntas).
Cicero, although a severe critic of Epicurus and disturbed by the idea of anything random, unequivocally denies fate, strict causal determinism, and God's foreknowledge.
If there is free will, all things do not happen according to fate; if all things do not happen according to fate, there is not a certain order of causes; and if there is not a certain order of causes, neither is there a certain order of things foreknown by God.
Although he defends human freedom, Cicero ridicules the presumptive Epicurean idea of a chance swerve as the direct cause of our decisions. (Note that Epicurus did not involve chance in decisions that are "up to us." For him chance simply breaks the chain of causal determinism.) Cicero's implication has created the mistaken notion that for libertarians, chance must be the direct cause of action. (Some free willists, notably Robert Kane
Robert Kane
Robert Kane may refer to:* Bob Kane , born as Robert Kahn; co-creator of Batman* Robert Kane , Irish chemist* Robert Kane , president of the United States Olympic Committee...
and his followers, do include chance directly in the decision.)
Epicurus saw that if the atoms travelled downwards by their own weight; we should have no freedom of the will [nihil fore in nostra potestate], since the motion of the atoms would be determined by necessity. He therefore invented a device to escape from determinism: he said that the atom while travelling vertically downward by the force of gravity makes a very slight swerve to one side. This defence discredits him more than if he had had to abandon his original position.
It was the Stoic school of philosophy
Stoicism
Stoicism is a school of Hellenistic philosophy founded in Athens by Zeno of Citium in the early . The Stoics taught that destructive emotions resulted from errors in judgment, and that a sage, or person of "moral and intellectual perfection," would not suffer such emotions.Stoics were concerned...
that solidified the idea of natural laws controlling all things, including the mind. Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium
Zeno of Citium was a Greek philosopher from Citium . Zeno was the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, which he taught in Athens from about 300 BC. Based on the moral ideas of the Cynics, Stoicism laid great emphasis on goodness and peace of mind gained from living a life of virtue in...
, the original founder of Stoicism, had a very simplistic but powerful idea of the causal chain compared to Aristotle.
Zeno said that every event has a cause, and that cause necessitates the event. Given exactly the same circumstances, exactly the same result will occur.
It is impossible that the cause be present yet that of which it is the cause not obtain.
ἀδύνατον δ’ εἴναι τὸ μὲν αἴτιον παρεῖναι, οὖ δέ ἐστιν αἴτιον μὴ ὑπάρχειν.
The Stoic influence persists to this day, in philosophy and religion. Most of the extensive Stoic writings are lost, probably because their doctrine of fate, which identified God with Nature, was considered anathema to the Christian church. The church agreed that the laws of God were the laws of Nature, but that God and Nature were two different entities. In either case strict determinism follows by universal Reason (logos) from an omnipotent God. Stoic virtue called for men to resist futile passions like anger and envy. The fine Stoic morality that all men (including slaves and women) were equal children of God coincided with (or was adopted by) the church. Stoic logic and physics freed those fields from ancient superstitions, but strengthened the dogmas of determinism that dominate modern science and philosophy, especially when they explicitly denied Aristotle's chance as a possible cause.
The First Compatibilist
The major developer of Stoicism, ChrysippusChrysippus
Chrysippus of Soli was a Greek Stoic philosopher. He was a native of Soli, Cilicia, but moved to Athens as a young man, where he became a pupil of Cleanthes in the Stoic school. When Cleanthes died, around 230 BC, Chrysippus became the third head of the school...
, took the edge off strict necessity. Like Democritus, Aristotle, and Epicurus before him, he wanted to strengthen the argument for moral responsibility, in particular defending it from Aristotle's and Epicurus' indeterminate chance causes.
Whereas the past is unchangeable, Chrysippus argued that some future events that are possible do not occur by necessity from past external factors alone, but might (as Aristotle and Epicurus maintained) depend on us. We have a choice to assent or not to assent to an action. This is a controversial idea and may be inconsistent with orthodox Stoic doctrines, since it suggests the existence of alternative possibilities and the capacity to do otherwise.
Chrysippus said our actions are determined (in part by ourselves as causes) and fated (because of God's foreknowledge), but he also said correctly that they are not necessitated, i.e., pre-determined from the distant past. Chrysippus would be seen today as a compatibilist, as was the Stoic Epictetus. He also has a strong element of agent-causalism.
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Alexander of Aphrodisias
Alexander of Aphrodisias was a Peripatetic philosopher and the most celebrated of the Ancient Greek commentators on the writings of Aristotle. He was a native of Aphrodisias in Caria, and lived and taught in Athens at the beginning of the 3rd century, where he held a position as head of the...
(c.150-210), the most famous commentator on Aristotle, wrote 500 years after Aristotle's death, at a time when Aristotle and Plato were rather forgotten minor philosophers in the age of Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Alexander defended a view of moral responsibility we would call libertarianism today. Greek philosophy had no precise term for "free will" as did Latin (liberum arbitrium or libera voluntas). The discussion was in terms of responsibility, what "depends on us" (in Greek ἐφ ἡμῖν).
Alexander believed that Aristotle was not a strict determinist like the Stoics, and Alexander himself argued that some events do not have pre-determined causes. In particular, man is responsible for self-caused decisions, and can choose to do or not to do something, as Chrysippus argued. However, Alexander denied the foreknowledge of events that was part of the Stoic identification of God and Nature.
Most of the ancient thinkers recognized the obvious difficulty with chance (or an uncaused cause) as the source of human freedom. Even Aristotle described chance as a "cause obscure to human reason" (ἀιτιάν ἄδελον ἀνθρωπίνᾠ λογισμῶ).
Actions caused by chance are simply random and we cannot feel responsible for them. But we do feel responsible. Despite more than twenty-three centuries of philosophizing, most modern thinkers have not moved significantly beyond this core problem of randomness and free will for libertarians - the confused idea that free actions are caused directly by a random event.
Caught between the horns of a dilemma, with determinism on one side and randomness on the other, the standard argument against free will
Standard argument against free will
The dilemma of determinism is the claim that if determinism is true, our actions are controlled by preceding events and thus we are not free; and that if indeterminism is true, our actions are random and we are likewise not free; and that as determinism and indeterminism exhaust the logical...
continues to render human freedom unintelligible (ἄδελον).
Carlo Giussani
Giussani put forward the idea that Epicurus' atomic swerves are involved directly in every case of human free action, not just somewhere in the past that breaks the causal chain of determinism.
The complete conception of the will according to Epicurus comprises two elements, a complex atomic movement which has the characteristic of spontaneity, that is, is withdrawn from the necessity of mechanical causation: and then the sensus, or self-consciousness in virtue of which the will, illuminated by previous movements of sensation, thought, and emotion, profits by the peculiar liberty or spontaneity of the atomic motions, to direct or not to direct these in a direction seen or selected.
Cyril Bailey
In 1928 Bailey agreed with Giussani that the atoms of the mind-soul provide a break in the continuity of atomic motions, otherwise actions would be necessitated. Bailey imagined complexes of mind-atoms that work together to form a consciousness that is not determined, but also not susceptible to the pure randomness of individual atomic swerves, something that could constitute Epicurus' idea of actions being "up to us" (πὰρ' ἡμάς).
It is a commonplace to state that Epicurus, like his follower Lucretius, intended primarily to combat the 'myths' of the orthodox religion, to show by his demonstration of the unfailing laws of nature the falseness of the old notions of the arbitrary action of the gods and so to relieve humanity from the terrors of superstition. But it is sometimes forgotten that Epicurus viewed with almost greater horror the conception of irresistible 'destiny' or 'necessity', which is the logical outcome of the notion of natural law pressed to its conclusion. This conclusion had been accepted in its fulness by Democritus, but Epicurus conspicuously broke away from him: 'it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the "destiny" of the natural philosophers: for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation'.
Bailey says clearly that Epicurus did not identify freedom of the will with chance.
It may be that [Giussani's] account presses the Epicurean doctrine slightly beyond the point to which the master had thought it out for himself, but it is a direct deduction from undoubted Epicurean conceptions and is a satisfactory explanation of what Epicurus meant:
that he should have thought that the freedom of the will was chance, and fought hard to maintain it as chance and no more, is inconceivable.
David Furley
In 1967 Furley examined the ideas of Giussani and Bailey and de-emphasized the importance of the swerve in both Epicurus and Lucretius so as to defend Epicurus from the "extreme" libertarian view that our actions are caused directly by random swerves. (Bailey had also denied this "traditional interpretation.") Furley argues for a strong connection between the ideas of Aristotle and Epicurus on autonomous actions that are "up to us."
If we now put together the introduction to Lucretius' passage on voluntas and Aristotle's theory of the voluntary, we can see how the swerve of atoms was supposed to do its work. Aristotle's criterion of the voluntary was a negative one: the source of the voluntary action is in the agent himself, in the sense that it cannot be traced back beyond or outside the agent himself. Lucretius says that voluntas must be saved from a succession of causes which can be traced back to infinity. All he needs to satisfy the Aristotelian criterion is a break in the succession of causes, so that the source of an action cannot be traced back to something occurring before the birth of the agent.
The swerve, then, plays a purely negative part in Epicurean psychology. It saves voluntas from necessity, as Lucretius says it does, but it does not feature in every act of voluntas.
Pamela Huby
In the same year 1967, Huby suggested that Epicurus was the original discoverer of the "freewill problem." Huby noted that there had been two main free will problems, corresponding to different determinisms, namely theological determinism (predestination and foreknowledge) and the physical causal determinism of Democritus.
It is unfortunate that our knowledge of the early history of the Stoics is so fragmentary, and that we have no agreed account of the relations between them and Epicurus. On the evidence we have, however, it seems to me more probable that Epicurus was the originator of the freewill controversy, and that it was only taken up with enthusiasm among the Stoics by Chrysippus, the third head of the school.
Richard SorabjiRichard SorabjiRichard Rustom Kharsedji Sorabji CBE, FBA is a British historian of ancient Western philosophy and Professor of Philosophy Emeritus at King's College London. He has written his own 'Intellectual Autobiography' in his Festschrift: R. Salles ed., Metaphysics, Soul and Ethics in Ancient Thought , 1-36...
Sorabji's 1980 Necessity, Cause, and Blame surveyed Aristotle's positions on causation and necessity, comparing them to his predecessors and successors, especially the Stoics and Epicurus. Sorabji argues that Aristotle was an indeterminist, that real chance and uncaused events exist, but never that human actions are uncaused in the extreme libertarian sense that some commentators mistakenly attribute to Epicurus.Aristotle accepted the past as fixed, in the sense that past events were irrevocable. But future events cannot be necessitated by claims about the present truth value of statements about the future. Aristotle does not deny the excluded middle (either p or not p), only that the truth value of p does not exist yet. Indeed, although the past is fixed, the truth value of past statements about the future can be changed by the outcome of future events. This is the problem of future contingents.
Sorabji claims that he can separate necessity from causality, with implications for causal determinism. In particular, he defends indeterminists against the charge that libertarian decisions are unintelligible.
[If] some of our decisions are not necessitated, it by no means follows that they are uncaused or inexplicable. If this is correct, it should answer the causal determinist's argument that, if some of our decisions are not necessary in advance, they will be inexplicable and mysterious happenings of which we cannot be held responsible. The answer suggested here is that from our decisions being unnecessitated it would not follow that they were inexplicable, or uncaused.
Sorabji considers the suggestions that quantum uncertainty disproves determinism, and he finds that Aristotle described "starting points" (ἄρχαι) for new causal chains that resemble probabilistic quantum events.
Finally, although he thinks Aristotle was not aware of the "problem" of free will vis-a-vis determinism (as first described by Epicurus), Sorabji thinks Aristotle's position on the question is clear enough. Voluntariness is too important to fall before theoretical arguments about necessity and determinism.
I come now to the question of how determinism is related to involuntariness. Many commentators nowadays hold one or more parts of the following view. Determinism creates a problem for belief in the voluntariness of actions. Regrettably, but inevitably, Aristotle was unaware of this problem, and so failed to cope with it. Indeed, the problem was not discovered until Hellenistic times, perhaps by Epicurus, who was over forty years junior to Aristotle, and who reached Athens just too late to hear his lectures. In Aristotle's time no one had yet propounded a universal determinism, so that he knew of no such theory. His inevitable failure to see the threat to voluntariness is all the more regrettable in that he himself entertained a deterministic account of actions, which exacerbated the problem of how any could be voluntary. I shall argue that this account misrepresents the situation
R. W. Sharples
Sharples' great translation and commentary Alexander of Aphrodisias On Fate appeared in 1983. He described Alexander's De Fato as perhaps the most comprehensive treatment surviving from classical antiquity of the problem of responsibility (τὸ ἐφ’ ἡμίν) and determinism. It especially shed a great deal of light on Aristotle's position on free will and on the Stoic attempt to make responsibility compatible with determinism.Sharples thinks that the problem of determinism and responsibility was not realised, in the form in which it was eventually passed on to post-classical thinkers, until relatively late in the history of Greek thought - at least not until after Aristotle.
Although there are passages in which it is recognised that there is something problematic in holding someone responsible for an action that a god has foretold he will perform, it is generally misleading in the interpretation of the literature of the fifth century B.C. and earlier to assume that the difficulty is always as obvious or as important as it seems to us. The mechanistic atomism of Democritus (born 460-457 B.C.) may well seem to us to raise difficulties for human responsibility, and it seemed to do so to Epicurus, but Democritus himself apparently felt no such problem.
The classic notion of determinism — of a system in which every state of affairs is a necessary consequence of any and every preceding state of affairs — is almost entirely absent from the approach to the physical world of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.)
It is with Epicurus and the Stoics that clearly indeterministic and deterministic positions are first formulated. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) claimed that human freedom could only be maintained in the atomist system by the unpredetermined swerve of certain atoms from the paths which they would otherwise follow.
Here Sharples introduces the mistaken criticism of Epicurus that was first made by Cicero and the Stoics and that he notices continues today.
The problems of this position, which seems to reduce responsible human choice to pure randomness, have often been pointed out; however, analogous problems seem involved in any attempt to treat responsibility in terms of the possibility of choosing otherwise, if this is to be combined with a rational explanation of why men do, or should, choose in a particular way.
Sharples describes the first compatibilist arguments to reconcile responsibility and determinism, by Chryssipus
The Stoic position, given definitive expression by Chrysippus (c. 280-207 B.C.), the third head of the school, represents not the opposite extreme from that of Epicurus but an attempt to compromise, to combine determinism and responsibility. Their theory of the universe is indeed a completely deterministic one; everything is governed by fate, identified with the sequence of causes; nothing could happen otherwise than it does, and in any given set of circumstances one and only one result can follow — otherwise an uncaused motion would occur.
Chrysippus was concerned to preserve human responsibility in the context of his determinist system. His position was thus one of 'soft determinism', as opposed on the one hand to that of the 'hard determinist' who claims that determinism excludes responsibility, and on the other to that of the libertarian who agrees on the incompatibility but responsibility by determinism. The Greek to eph' hemin, 'what depends on us', like the English 'responsibility', was used both by libertarians and by soft determinists, though they differed as to what it involved; thus he occurrence of the expression is not a safe guide to the type of position involved. The situation is complicated by the fact that the debate is in Greek philosophy conducted entirely in terms of responsibility (to eph' hemin) rather than of freedom or free will; nevertheless it can be shown that some thinkers, Alexander among them, have a libertarian rather than a soft-determinist conception of responsibility, and in such cases I have not hesitated to use expressions like 'freedom'.
A. A. LongA. A. LongAnthony Arthur Long is a British and naturalised American classical scholar and Professor of Classics and Irving Stone Professor of Literature at the University of California, Berkeley....
and D. N. Sedley
In their great 1987 work The Hellenistic Philosophers (dedicated to David Furley), Long and Sedley discussed Epicurus and the free will problem at length, with references to the principal original Greek and Latin sources. They agree with Pamela Huby that Epicurus was the first to notice the modern problem of free will and determinism.
Epicurus' problem is this: if it has been necessary all along that we should act as we do, it cannot be up to us, with the result that we would not be morally responsible for our actions at all. Thus posing the problem of determinism he becomes arguably the first philosopher to recognize the philosophical centrality of what we know as the Free Will Question. His strongly libertarian approach to it can be usefully contrasted with the Stoics' acceptance of determinism.
Don Fowler
In his 1983 thesis, "Lucretius on the Clinamen and 'Free Will'," Fowler criticized Sedley's limits on the swerve and defended the ancient - but seriously mistaken - claim that Epicurus proposed random swerves as directly causing our actions. This mistaken claim has become common in current interpretations of Epicurus.
I turn to the overall interpretation. Lucretius is arguing from the existence of voluntas to the existence of the clinamen; nothing comes to be out of nothing, therefore voluntas must have a cause at the atomic level, viz. the clinamen. The most natural interpretation of this is that every act of voluntas is caused by a swerve in the atoms of the animal's mind....There is a close causal, physical relationship between the macroscopic and the atomic. Furley, however, argued that the relationship between voluntas and the clinamen was very different; not every act of volition was accompanied by a swerve in the soul-atoms, but the clinamen was only an occasional event which broke the chain of causation between the σύστασις of our mind at birth and the 'engendered' state (τὸ ἀπογεγεννημένον) which determines our actions.Its role in Epicureanism is
merely to make a formal break with physical determinism, and it has no real effect on the outcome of particular actions.
(p.338).
Julia AnnasJulia AnnasJulia Elizabeth Annas is a British American philosopher. She is Regents Professor of Philosophy at the University of Arizona.-Biography:...
In her 1992 book, The Hellenistic Philosophy of Mind, Annas finds it hard to see how random swerves can help to explain free action.
...since swerves are random, it is hard to see how they help to explain free action. We can scarcely expect there to be a random swerve before every free action. Free actions are frequent, and (fairly) reliable. Random swerves cannot account for either of these features. This problem would be lessened if we could assume that swerves are very frequent, so that there is always likely to be one around before an action. However, if swerves are frequent, we face the problem that stones and trees ought to be enabled to act freely. And even in the case of humans random swerves would seem to produce, if anything, random actions; we still lack any clue as to how they could produce actions which are free.
Jeffrey Purinton
In a 1999 Phronesis article, Purinton agrees with Fowler that random swerves directly cause volitions and actions. The ideas of Furley and Fowler do not do justice to Epicurus' libertarianism, he says, "since they do not make volition itself a fresh start of motion, and Sedley's view does not do justice to his atomism...It seems to me, therefore, that there is no good reason to reject the thesis that Epicurus held that swerves cause volitions from the bottom up. And there are a number of good reasons to accept it."Susanne BobzienSusanne BobzienSusanne Bobzien is a German-born philosopher, who currently holds the position of Senior Research Scholar in Philosophy at Yale University. Her areas of specialization include philosophy of logic and language, determinism and freedom, and ancient philosophy....
In Bobzien's 1998 book Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy she made a detailed analysis of arguments, especially those of Chrysippus, for the compatibilism of freedom with causal determinism.In her book and a 1998 article in Phronesis (Vol. 43, No. 2 (May, 1998), pp. 133–175), Bobzien identified several variations on the theme of human freedom that were important in antiquity. Three of them are indeterminist freedoms, by which she means the decision is partly or wholly a matter of chance, and does not involve the character and values of the agent:
1) freedom to do otherwise: I am free to do otherwise if, being the same agent, with the same desires and beliefs, and being in the same circumstances, it is possible for me to do or not to do something in the sense that it is not fully causally determined whether or not I do it.
2) freedom of decision: a subtype of freedom to do otherwise. I am free in my decision, if being the same agent, with the same desires and beliefs, and being in the same circumstances, it is possible for me to decide between alternative courses of action in the sense that it is not fully causally determined which way I decide. 1) differs from 2) in that it leaves it undecided in which way it is possible for the agent to do or not to do something.
3) freedom of the will: a subtype of freedom of decision. I act from free will, if I am in the possession of a will, i.e. a specific part or faculty of the soul by means of which I can decide between alternative courses of actions independently of my desires and beliefs, in the sense that it is not fully causally determined in which way I decide. 2) differs from 3) in that the latter postulates a specific causally independent faculty or part of the soul which functions as a "decision making faculty."
Then in 2000 Bobzien challenged Pamela Huby's 1967 assertion that Epicurus discovered the "free will problem." She did not mention that Long and Sedley shared Huby's view.
In 1967 Epicurus was credited with the discovery of the problem of free will and determinism. Among the contestants were Aristotle and the early Stoics. Epicurus emerged victorious, because — so the argument went — Aristotle did not yet have the problem, and the Stoics inherited it from Epicurus. In the same year David Furley published his essay 'Aristotle and Epicurus on Voluntary Action', in which he argued that Epicurus' problem was not the free will problem. In the thirty-odd years since then, a lot has been published about Epicurus on freedom and determinism. But it has only rarely been questioned whether Epicurus, in one way or another, found himself face to face with some version of the free will problem.
Bobzien thinks Epicurus did not have a model of what she calls "two-sided freedom," because she follows Don Fowler, Julia Annas, and Jeffrey Purinton, in believing that Epidurus
"assumed....a gap in the causal chain immediately before, or simultaneously with, the decision or choice, a gap which allows the coming into being of a spontaneous motion. In this way every human decision or choice is directly linked with causal indeterminism....To avoid misunderstandings, I should stress that I do believe that Epicurus was an indeterminist of sorts — only that he did not advocate indeterminist free decision or indeterminist free choice.
Bobzien is of course right that Epicurus did not think that our decisions were made at random with no regard for our character and values, or for our feelings and desires. This is a straw argument put up by critics of Epicurean philosophy, notably the Stoic Chryssipus and the Academic Skeptic Cicero.
But Bobzien is wrong to suggest that Epicurus did not see a problem between human freedom and the causal determinism of his fellow atomist Democritus, and that his atomic swerve was not his proposed solution to that "free will problem." She notes that
Whether Epicurus discussed free will depends on what one means by 'free will'. For example, if one intends 'free will' to render Lucretius "libera voluntas," and to mean whatever element of Epicurus' doctrine Lucretius meant to capture by this phrase, then Epicurus evidently was concerned with free will. My concern is only to show that he did not discuss a problem of free will that involves a conception of freedom of decision or choice as adumbrated in the main text. [namely, the "extreme" libertarianism in which chance is the direct cause of action.]