Free Will in Ancient Thought

The prompts are about what we need to understand to evaluate Frede's argument.

Answers to the prompts are entries in a research notebook. We add them over time to help ourselves understand his argument and put ourselves in a position to evaluate it.

I provide an example so that you can more clearly see what I mean.

This example answer would receive full credit because is a clear and complete enough analysis to be useful to someone who is trying to understand and evaluate Frede's argument.

Example Answer to a Prompt

⊕ "[That free will is a technical, philosophical notion is] not the view scholars took until fairly recently. They went on the assumption that the notion of a free will is an ordinary notion, part of the repertory of notions in terms of which the ordinary person thinks about things and in terms of which the ancient Greeks must have already been thinking all along. And on this assumption, of course, there is no place for the question of when the ancients first came to think of human beings as having a free will" (12).

"The assumption that the Greeks all along must have been thinking of human beings as having a free will seems truly astounding nowadays" (12). "[T]here is no sign of [a reference to, let alone a mention of, free will] in [Plato and Aristotle's] works. Scholars did indeed notice this with a certain amount of puzzlement. But it did not occur to them to draw what would seem to be the obvious inference, namely, that Plato and Aristotle did not yet have a notion of a free will and that it was for this reason that they did not talk of a free will. As eminent a scholar as W. D. Ross again could note that Plato and Aristotle do not refer to a will, let alone a free will. But even Ross concludes that we must assume that Aristotle, as Ross puts it, 'shared the plain man's belief in free will'" (12-13).

"And, largely due to the influence of mainstream Christianity, [the notion of free will] ... gained almost universal acceptance. ... Even if [the believers] themselves were not able to give a theoretical account of what a free will is, they relied on such an account's being available. This had the effect that the mere assumption that sometimes we are responsible for what we are doing ... came to be regarded as tantamount to a belief in a free will. From here it was just a short step to the assumption that the mere notion of a free will was an ordinary notion, with philosophical theory coming in only to give a theoretical account of what it is to have a free will. This is why Ross could assume that Aristotle shared the plain man's belief in a free will but failed to give a theoretical account of that" (13).

"[S]ince even Aristotle does not yet talk of a free will, we should assume that he did not yet have a notion of a free will. This indeed is what scholars nowadays are generally agreed on. The change of scholarly opinion is largely due to the fact that philosophical discussions, of the kind we find, for instance, in Gilbert Ryle's The Concept of Mind, have persuaded scholars that the notion of a free will is at best a highly controversial notion" (13-14).

Frede claims that scholars only recently have realized that the notion of free will is a technical, philosophical notion. Explain why Frede thinks the notion appeared to scholars as an ordinary notion. Consider whether he is right to understand W. D. Ross as he does.

In opposition to the view he thinks W. D. Ross and other scholars endorsed not too long ago, Frede maintains that the notion of free will is not an ordinary notion in terms which human beings have pretty much always understood themselves. Instead, he thinks that it is a technical, philosophical notion that emerged in late Stoicism as part of a theory to explain why it is true that sometimes when we do something, we are responsible for what we do.

Frede thinks that the spread of Christianity caused the notion of free will to appear to many as an ordinary notion. Regular Christians committed themselves to the belief that everyone has free will, even if they did not know the theory that was supposed to make sense of this idea. The content of their belief in free will, because they did not know the theory, was no more that sometimes when we do something, we are responsible for what we do.

This led to the use of the term free will to mean that we sometimes are responsible for what we do, and Frede thinks that scholars got their belief by absorbing this use of the term.

It is hard to know whether Frede is correct. Ross says that "[o]n the whole we must say that he shared the plain man's belief in free will but that he did not examine the problem very thoroughly, and did not express himself with perfect consistency" (W. D. Ross, Aristotle, 201. Methuen & Company, 1923.) In saying this, Ross does not have to be understood as Frede understands him. He may only mean that Aristotle did not give a detailed and completely consistent explanation for why it is true that we sometimes are responsible for what we do.

Ross, however, if this is all that he means, does nothing to prevent his readers from misunderstanding him in the way Frede understands him. Ross easily could have said that Aristotle only has the "plain man's belief in free will," that this is the belief that we are sometimes responsible for what we do, and that Aristotle does not examine this belief "very thoroughly" and "express" his account of why it is true with "perfect consistency."

Since Ross does not say this, maybe Frede is right. Maybe, as he says, it was not until Gilbert Ryle made the argument in 1949 in his The Concept of Mind that it began to become clear that free will is a technical notion. Frede writes that "scholars nowadays" (the late 1990s when he writes) have "generally" come to think that free will is not an ordinary notion, but the 2022 article "Free Will" in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy suggests that Frede's view is not universal among contemporary philosophers. The authors reject Frede's historical inquiry into the origin of the notion. They do not mention Ryle in their article or its bibliography.