This volume collects nine previously published papers: three on Aristotle; two on the Epicureans; three on the Stoics; and one (the opening chapter) on the broader Aristotelian tradition. The papers on Aristotle originally appeared in 2013–14; the remainder date to 1998–2006. With one significant exception (Chapter 8) described below, all papers appear in their original form with minor further editing, including the useful addition of original texts and English translations in cases where one or the other was missing.
As the title of the collection suggests, these papers continue B.'s project in her 1998 monograph Determinism and Freedom in Stoic Philosophy; and they do so successfully. Readers familiar with that earlier work will recognise this as high praise, for it was one of the finest achievements in scholarship on ancient philosophy over at least the past half-century. A major throughline of the current book is that earlier volume's main negative thesis: namely that, until a surprisingly late date, ancient Greek and Roman philosophers were unconcerned with what we nowadays call the free-will problem. That is, they were unconcerned with the problem of how people could be held morally responsible for their actions in a deterministic world on the assumption that a responsible agent could have acted otherwise. Instead, the agenda for discussion of these topics was long governed by a different conception of moral responsibility, namely that responsibility for an action requires being the cause of that action. The relevant problem on that conception is: in a deterministic world, how can an agent be held responsible as the proper cause of an action (instead of being regarded merely as the forced vehicle, as it were, of the action's occurring)?
This thesis is underscored by the volume's first chapter, ‘The Inadvertent Conception and Late Birth of the Free-Will Problem: Aristotle to Alexander of Aphrodisias’, which considers the earliest surviving discussion of the problem, found in Alexander of Aphrodisias’ On Fate. In this text unnamed Stoics are reported to maintain a deterministic view (recognisable as a descendent of Chrysippus’ determinism) in the face of opponents who assert that moral responsibility for an action can indeed attach only to an agent who is free in the robust sense of being able to act otherwise. Where, asks B., does the claim of these opponents come from? The story she tells in answer to this question is quite complex – in a scholarly tour de force, it weaves through (among other places) early commentators on Aristotle, surviving Middle Platonist texts (and inferences about lost ones) and developments internal to later Stoicism –, but, crucially, she argues that the requisite conception of responsibility cannot have emerged without a number of other unrelated developments first converging, which in turn cannot have happened before the second century ce. Only then were Aristotle's defenders finally in position (and motivated) to claim that humans possess a power of deciding freely what to do; that sort of freedom was a late birth indeed.
This perspective is brought to bear on Aristotle himself in two papers (Chapter 3, ‘Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 1113b7–8 and Free Choice’ and Chapter 4, ‘Found in Translation: Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics 3.5, 1113b7–8 and Its Reception’) both devoted to a single sentence that has been widely (but wrongly, B. argues) appealed to as evidence that Aristotle was an early proponent of an indeterminist notion of free choice and so a precursor to modern libertarianism. It is also brought to bear on Epicurus, who is argued to have introduced the notorious ‘swerve’ (an occasional random motion of an atom) into his account of human psychology so as to make humans autonomous from their environments in causing actions, and not to enable somehow free choices among alternatives (Chapter 6, ‘Did Epicurus Discover the Free-Will Problem?’). Some of B.'s main points from her earlier book about the Stoic conception of what is dependent on us (eph’ hēmin) and how that conception shifted over time are nicely reframed (for a more general readership) in Chapter 7, ‘Stoic Conceptions of Freedom and Their Relation to Ethics: Early Stoics, Epictetus, Late Stoics’.
I do not mean to imply that the main achievement of this volume is the defence of the negative thesis described above. Rather, in exorcising the ghost of free will from (much of) ancient philosophy, B. clears the ground for fresh views of ancient theories of agency and moral responsibility – including her own positive views.
In Chapter 2, ‘Choice and Moral Responsibility in Nicomachean Ethics 3.1–5’, B. offers a unified reading of a passage whose overall purpose has been much contested. On her account, Aristotle's primary aim is to give an outline of how agents are responsible specifically for the moral qualities of their actions. To do this, he explains how an agent's character is causally involved in bringing about those actions (namely the voluntary ones) for which people are held responsible and so praised or blamed. Actions thus inherit their morally evaluable qualities from the agent's character and are rightly praised (or blamed) on account of the virtue (or vice) of the agent. It is an elegant line of interpretation that gains in plausibility if (as B. urges) we drop the supposition shared by many scholars that Aristotle is attempting to ground moral responsibility in free will or a power of free deliberation.
Epicurus is presented (Chapter 5, ‘Moral Responsibility and Moral Development in Epicurus’ Philosophy’), in a paper that is necessarily rather speculative given the state of our evidence, as grounding moral responsibility in a fundamentally developmental account of human agency. In early life our behaviour is determined entirely by our natural constitutions – our starter kit of atoms – and environmental factors. But eventually a human gains moral agency, factoring as a third cause (alongside nature and environment) of behaviour. This change perhaps involves the acquisition of new beliefs, or our self-identification with certain of our beliefs rather than others. And the moral agent can then undergo a process of gradual self-improvement, restructuring their concepts and beliefs in light of a correct understanding of the Epicurean telos. In Chapter 6 B. argues that the ‘swerve’ is introduced into Epicurus’ account of human agency precisely to account for the possibility of such gradual changes, along the way offering interesting reflections on how Epicureans must think of the swerve if it is to play any useful explanatory role.
Two chapters round off the volume with discussion of Chrysippean Stoicism. Chapter 8, ‘Early Stoic Determinism: The Merging of Teleology and Universal Causation’, analyses the elements in early Stoic thought that contributed to Chrysippus’ distinctive form of determinism. There is on the one hand the view of the cosmos as a rationally organised entity with a nature of its own, developing towards its natural ends, yielding a cosmic teleology, and on the other Chrysippus’ denial of the possibility of spontaneous motions, which leads him to the articulation of a universal causal determinism. These views are synthesised in the Stoic doctrine of Fate as a network of causes structuring and determining all things. This paper is a treasure trove of insights into early Stoic physical theory, and it is especially welcome on account of roughly ten pages of ‘new’ material, mainly on points of interest in Stoic theology, appearing here in print for the first time (having been cut for length from the original publication). Finally, Chapter 9, ‘Chrysippus’ Theory of Causes’, covers some of the same ground as Chapter 6 of Determinism and Freedom and can be read profitably together with that work.
B.'s introduction notes a relatively small number of scholarly works more recent than the original publication of these papers; it feels like a missed opportunity not to have updated the volume's bibliography with a more extensive list of relevant recent work. This is, however, a small complaint about a truly excellent collection.
