Free will in antiquity

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).

Early religious accounts of man's fate explored the degree of human freedom permitted by superhuman gods. A strong fatalism is present in 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 idea that the gods' foreknowledge is compatible with human freedom.

The first thinkers to look for explanatory causes (ἀιτία) in natural phenomena (rather than gods controlling events) were the Greek Pre-Socratic philosophers (physiologoi). The reasons or rules (λόγοι) behind the physical (φύσις) world became the ideal "laws" governing material phenomena. Anaximander (610-546) 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 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. These physiologoi transformed pre-philosophical arguments about gods controlling the human will into arguments about pre-existing causes controlling it.

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