Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility: Essays in Ancient Philosophy

Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility brings together nine essays on determinism, freedom and moral responsibility in antiquity by Susanne Bobzien. The essays present the main ancient theories of determinism, freedom, and moral responsibility ranging from Aristotle via Epicureans and Stoics to Alexander of Aphrodisias in the third century CE. The author discusses questions about rational and autonomous human agency and their compatibility with preceding causes, external or internal; with external impediments; with divine predetermination and theological questions; with physical theories like atomism and continuum theory, and with the sciences more generally; with elements that determine character development from childhood, such as nature and nurture; with epistemic features such as ignorance of circumstances; with necessity and modal theories generally; with folk theories of fatalism; and also with questions of how human autonomous agency is related to moral development, virtue and wisdom, blame and praise. Historically unified, philosophically profound, and methodologically rigorous, Bobzien’s discussions show that in classical and Hellenistic philosophy these topics were all debated without reference to freedom to do otherwise or to free will, and that the latter two notions were fully developed only later.

Susanne Bobzien, University of Oxford and All Souls College, Oxford

Susanne Bobzien is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She was previously Professor of Philosophy at Yale University, and before that a Tutorial Fellow at The Queens’ and Balliol Colleges, Oxford. She is a Fellow of the British Academy and has been the recipient of a British Academy Research Readership and of a Fellowship of the National Endowment for the Humanities, among other grants. She is the author of several books, including Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy (Oxford, 1999), and has published numerous articles both in contemporary philosophy and in ancient philosophy.