Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy

by Susanne Bobzien

Bobzien presents the definitive study of one of the most interesting intellectual legacies of the ancient Greeks: the Stoic theory of causal determinism. She explains what it was, how the Stoics justified it, and how it relates to their views on possibility, action, freedom, moral responsibility, and many other topics. She demonstrates the considerable philosophical richness and power that these ideas retain today.

Genres: Philosophy

454 pages, Paperback

First published January 28, 1999

Reviews

[Kiki023 · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since nobody has taken the time to write a review, I'll do the honor. Put simply, this is a comprehensive and deeply learned work of philosophical scholarship. Predicated on an exegesis of just about every relevant stoic primary source and fragment in our possession, Bobzien successfully recovers the early Stoic (or more aptly Chrysippean) theory of universal causal determinism. She demonstrates how ancient problems of moral responsibility/autonomy and their compatibility with the Stoic understanding of universal determinism were distinct from contemporary debates over indeterminism and the freedom to choose otherwise. Separating the notion of "necessity" from fated action allowed Chrysippus to rescue a viable understanding of contingency and culpability from the jaws of his most vociferous detractors. Actions are co-fated by internal and external causes, divination deals with regularities whose relationship to predicted outcomes are coincidental and not causal, and possibility and non-factual necessity are saved by postulating the absence of physical hindrances as necessary conditions for the actualization of propositions.

Contextual analysis of technical Stoic vocabulary reveals an understanding of autonomy that differs significantly from our own. Instead of an indeterminate two-sided potestative understanding of freedom, one which would entail the power/capacity of choice, the stoics developed a notion of "that which depends on us", one which allowed for a dependence of responsibility on the internal moral disposition of an individual and the internal primary cause of assent to external impressions, even if those external impressions and individual moral characters have been determined by a network of antecedent causes. In this way, stoics like Chrysippus could evade the necessitarian (and grim) conclusions of the Idle, Sage, and Mower arguments leveled against them. Furthermore, we are granted an interesting (if somewhat speculative) account of how the modern problem of free will emerged from these ancient debates over dependence and determinism. Confrontation between the stoic and peripatetic systems triggered a shift in terminology and emphasis that led to the emergence of a notion of freedom concerned with the exercise of a rational faculty (or will) that could defy our own moral character and activate the power to choose between actions.

I am not certain as to the state of scholarship in this subject in the two decades since this book was published, but this is a decisive intervention in the interpretation of stoic determinism and one that cannot be ignored by anyone interested in the topic.