The first thinkers to look for explanatory causes (ἀιτία) in natural phenomena (rather than gods controlling events) were the Greek physiologoi or cosmologists. The reasons or rules (λόγοι) behind the physical (φύσις) world became the ideal "laws" governing material phenomena. The first cosmologist was Anaximander (610-546), who 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' intuition that their laws could produce an ordered cosmos out of chaos was prescient. Our current model of the universe begins with a state of minimal information and maximum disorder. 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. The physiologoi transformed pre-philosophical arguments about gods controlling the human will into arguments about pre-existing causes controlling it. The cosmological problem became a psychological problem. Some saw a causal chain of events leading back to a first cause (later taken by many religious thinkers to be God). Other physiologoi held that although all physical events are caused, mental events might not be. This is mind/body dualism, perhaps the most important of all great dualisms. If the mind (or soul) is a substance different from matter, it could have its own laws different from the laws of nature for material bodies, and agents might originate new causal chains. The materialist philosophers Democritus and his mentor Leucippus were the first determinists. With extraordinary prescience, they claimed that all things, including humans, were made of atoms in a void, with individual atomic motions strictly controlled by causal laws. Democritus said: "By convention (nomos) color, by convention sweet, by convention bitter, but in reality atoms and a void." νόμῳ χροιή, νόμῳ γλυκύ, νόμῳ πικρόν, ἑτεῇ δ’ ἄτομα καὶ κενόν (Diels Kranz, fragment B125) Democritus wanted to wrest control of man's fate from arbitrary gods and make us more Democritus wanted to wrest control of man's fate from arbitrary gods and make us more responsible for our actions. But ironically, he and Leucippus originated two of the great dogmas of determinism , physical determinism and logical necessity , which lead directly to the traditional and modern problem of free will and determinism Leucippus stated the first dogma, an absolute necessity which left no room in the cosmos for chance. "Nothing occurs at random (maten), but everything for a reason (logos) and by necessity." οὐδὲν χρῆμα μάτηῳ γίνεται, ἀλλὰ πάντα ἐκ λόγου τε καὶ ὑπ’ ἀνάγκης The consequence is a world with but one possible future, completely determined by its past. Some even argued for a great cycle of events (an idea borrowed from Middle Eastern sources) repeating themselves over thousands of years. The consequence is a world with but one possible future, completely determined by its past. Some even argued for a great cycle of events (an idea borrowed from Middle Eastern sources) repeating themselves over thousands of years. The first major philosopher to argue convincingly for some indeterminism was probably Aristotle. First he described a causal chain (ἄλυσις) back to a prime mover or first cause, and he elaborated four possible causes (material, efficient, formal, and final). Aristotle's word for these causes was ἀιτία, which translates as causes in the sense of the multiple factors responsible for an event. Aristotle did not subscribe to the simplistic "every event has a (single) cause" idea that was to come later.

Then, in his Physics and Metaphysics, Aristotle also said there were "accidents" caused by " chance (τυχή)."In his Physics, he clearly reckoned chance among the causes. Aristotle might have added chance as a fifth cause - an uncaused or self-caused cause - one he thought happens when two causal chains come together by accident (συμβεβεκός). He noted that the early physicists had found no place for chance among their causes. Aristotle opposed his accidental chance to necessity: Nor is there any definite cause for an accident, but only chance (τυχόν), namely an indefinite (ἀόριστον) cause.

(Metaphysics, Book V, 1025a25) 2a It is obvious that there are principles and causes which are generable and destructible apart from the actual processes of generation and destruction; for if this is not true, everything will be of necessity: that is, if there must necessarily be some cause, other than accidental, of that which is generated and destroyed. Will this be, or not? Yes, if this happens; otherwise not.

(Metaphysics, Book VI, 1027a29) Tracing any particular sequence of events back in time will usually come to an accidental event - a "starting point" or "fresh start" (Aristotle calls it an origin or arche (ἀρχῆ) - whose major contributing cause (or causes) was itself uncaused, e.g., it involved irreducible chance (today's quantum indeterminacy). Tracing any particular sequence of events back in time will usually come to an accidental event - a "starting point" or "fresh start" (Aristotle calls it an origin or arche (ἀρχῆ) - whose major contributing cause (or causes) was itself uncaused, e.g., it involved irreducible chance (today's quantum indeterminacy). Whether a particular thing happens, says Aristotle, may depend on a series of causes that goes back to some starting-point, which does not go back to something else. This, therefore, will be the starting-point of the fortuitous, and nothing else is the cause of its generation.

(Metaphysics Book VI 1027b12-14) In general, Whether a particular thing happens, says Aristotle, may depend on a series of causes thatIn general, many such causal sequences contribute to any event, including human decisions. Each sequence has a different time of origin, some going back before we were born, some originating during our deliberations. tertium quid beyond beyond chance and necessity Beyond causal sequences that are the result of chance or necessity, Aristotle felt that some breaks in the causal chain allow us to feel our actions " But if it is manifest that a man is the author of his own actions, if we are unable to trace conduct back to any other origins than those within ourselves, then actions of which the origins are within us (ἐν ἡμῖν), themselves depend upon us (ἐφ' ἡμῖν), and are voluntary (ἐκούσια - willed).

(Nichomachean Ethics, III.v.6, 1113b21-22) Beyond causal sequences that are the result of chance or necessity, Aristotle felt that some breaks in the causal chain allow us to feel our actions " depend on us " (ἐφ' ἡμῖν). These are the causal chains that originate within us (ἐv ἡμῖν). Aristotle defends chance (τυχή) as providing a break in any causal chain, but he never says that human free choices are made by chance. Instead, he introduces a tertium quid, a "third thing" that is neither chance (τύχη) nor necessity (ᾶνάγκη). For Aristotle, our decisions are " Aristotle defends chance (τυχή) as providing a break in any causal chain, but he never says that human free choices are made by chance. Instead, he introduces a, a "third thing" that is neither chance (τύχη) nor necessity (ᾶνάγκη). For Aristotle, our decisions are " up to us " (ἐφ ἡμῖν), a phrase that comes closest to our modern free will. Aristotle knew that many of our decisions are quite predictable based on habit and character, but they are no less free nor we less responsible if our character itself and predictable habits were developed freely in the past and are changeable in the future. Aristotle knew that many of our decisions are quite predictable based on habit and character, but they are no less free nor we less responsible if our character itself and predictable habits were developed freely in the past and are changeable in the future. This is the view of some Eastern philosophies and religions. Our Karma has been determined by past actions (even from past lives), and strongly influences our current actions, but we are free to improve our Karma by good actions.

One generation after Aristotle, Epicurus argued that as atoms moved through the void, there were occasions when they would "swerve" from their otherwise determined paths, thus initiating new causal chains. Epicurus argued that these swerves would allow us to be more responsible for our actions, something impossible if every action was deterministically caused. For Epicurus, the occasional interventions of arbitrary gods would be preferable to strict determinism. Epicurus did not say the ...some things happen of necessity (ἀνάγκη), others by chance (τύχη), others through our own agency (παρ’ ἡμᾶς).

...necessity destroys responsibility and chance is inconstant; whereas our own actions are autonomous, and it is to them that praise and blame naturally attach. λέγει ἐν ἄλλοις γίνεσθαι ἃ μὲν κατ’ ἀνάγκην, ἃ δὲ ἀπὸ τύχης, ἃ δὲ παρ’ ἡμᾶς, διὰ τὸ τὴν μὲν ἀνάγκην ἀνυπεύθυνον εἶναι, τὴν δὲ τύχην ἄστατον ὁρᾶν, τὸ δὲ παρ’ ἡμᾶς ἀδέσποτον, ᾧ καὶ τὸ μεμπτὸν καὶ τὸ ἐναντίον παρακολουθεῖν πέφυκεν

(Letter to Menoeceus, §133) Epicurus did not say the swerve was directly involved in decisions . His critics, ancient and modern, have claimed mistakenly that Epicurus did assume "one swerve - one decision" and that "free " actions are uncaused. But following Aristotle, Epicurus thought human agents have the autonomous ability to transcend necessity and chance (both of which destroy responsibility), so that praise and blame are appropriate. Parenthetically, we now know that atoms do not occasionally swerve, they move unpredictably whenever they are in close contact with other atoms. Everything in the material universe is made of atoms in unstoppable perpetual motion. Deterministic paths are only the case for very large objects, where the statistical laws of atomic physics average to become nearly certain dynamical laws for billiard balls and planets. Parenthetically, we now know that atoms do not occasionally swerve, they move unpredictably whenever they are in close contact with other atoms. Everything in the material universe is made of atoms in unstoppable perpetual motion. Deterministic paths are only the case for very large objects, where the statistical laws of atomic physics average to become nearly certain dynamical laws for billiard balls and planets.

So Epicurus' intuition of a fundamental randomness in nature was correct. And he agreed with Aristotle that there is another basic kind of causes beyond necessity (άνάyκη) and chance (τυχῆ). They both said our actions are " up to us " (ἐφ' ἡμῖν or παρ’ ῆμᾶς). How exactly determinism and chance relate to autonomous agent causality is not made clear by either of them, and it remains a challenge for theories of free will We know Epicurus' work largely from the Roman We know Epicurus' work largely from the Roman Lucretius and his friend Cicero Lucretius, a strong supporter of Epicurus, saw the randomness as enabling free will, even if he could not explain exactly how, beyond the fact that random swerves would break the causal chain of determinism. Again, if all motion is always one long chain, and new motion arises out of the old in order invariable, and if the first-beginnings do not make by swerving a beginning of motion such as to break the decrees of fate, that cause may not follow cause from infinity, whence comes this freedom (libera) in living creatures all over the earth, whence I say is this will (voluntas) wrested from the fates by which we proceed whither pleasure leads each, swerving also our motions not at fixed times and fixed places, but just where our mind has taken us? For undoubtedly it is his own will in each that begins these things, and from the will movements go rippling through the limbs. Lucretius' "first beginning" (primordia motus principium) seems to be a reference to Lucretius, a strong supporter of Epicurus, saw the randomness as enabling free will, even if he could not explain exactly how, beyond the fact that random swerves would break the causal chain of determinism.Lucretius' "first beginning" (primordia motus principium) seems to be a reference to Aristotle 's starting point (ἀρχῆ)) and a kind of causa sui that would start additional new causal chains under the control of the mind ("just where our mind has taken us"). The Latin original libera in "whence comes this freedom" has often been translated as "free will," influenced perhaps by the centuries-old free will debate. But Lucretius himself clearly distinguishes the "free" (libera) from the "will" (voluntas). Cicero, a severe critic of Epicurus, unequivocally denies fate, strict causal determinism, and God's foreknowledge. If there is free will, all things do not happen according to fate; if all things do not happen according to fate, there is not a certain order of causes; and if there is not a certain order of causes, neither is there a certain order of things foreknown by God. Although he defends human freedom, Cicero ridicules the presumptive Epicurean idea of a Epicurus saw that if the atoms travelled downwards by their own weight; we should have no freedom of the will [nihil fore in nostra potestate], since the motion of the atoms would be determined by necessity. He therefore invented a device to escape from determinism: he said that the atom while travelling vertically downward by the force of gravity makes a very slight swerve to one side. This defence discredits him more than if he had had to abandon his original position. Cicero, a severe critic of Epicurus, unequivocally denies fate, strict causal determinism, and God's foreknowledge.Although he defends human freedom, Cicero ridicules the presumptive Epicurean idea of a chance swerve as the cause of our decisions . (Note that Epicurus did not involve chance in decisions that are " up to us ." For him chance simply breaks the chain of causal determinism.) Cicero's implication has created the mistaken notion that for libertarians, chance is the direct cause of action

It was the Stoic school of philosophy that solidified the idea of natural laws controlling all things, including the mind.Zeno of Citium, the original founder of Stoicism, had a very simplistic but powerful idea of the causal chain compared to Aristotle. Zeno said that It is impossible that the cause be present yet that of which it is the cause not obtain. ἀδύνατον δ’ εἴναι τὸ μὲν αἴτιον παρεῖναι, οὖ δέ ἐστιν αἴτιον μὴ ὑπάρχειν. Zeno said that every event has a cause , and that cause necessitates the event. Given exactly the same circumstances , exactly the same result will occur. The Stoic influence persists to this day, in philosophy and religion. Most of the extensive Stoic writings are lost, probably because their doctrine of fate, which identified God with Nature, was considered anathema to the Christian church. The church agreed that the laws of God were the laws of Nature, but that God and Nature were two different entities. In either case strict determinism follows by universal Reason (logos) from an omnipotent God. Stoic virtue called for men to resist futile passions like anger and envy. The fine Stoic morality that all men (including slaves and women) were equal children of God coincided with (or was adopted by) the church. Stoic logic and physics freed those fields from ancient superstitions, but strengthened the The Stoic influence persists to this day, in philosophy and religion. Most of the extensive Stoic writings are lost, probably because their doctrine of fate, which identified God with Nature, was considered anathema to the Christian church. The church agreed that the laws of God were the laws of Nature, but that God and Nature were two different entities. In either case strict determinism follows by universal Reason (logos) from an omnipotent God. Stoic virtue called for men to resist futile passions like anger and envy. The fine Stoic morality that all men (including slaves and women) were equal children of God coincided with (or was adopted by) the church. Stoic logic and physics freed those fields from ancient superstitions, but strengthened the dogmas of determinism that dominate modern science and philosophy, especially when they explicitly denied Aristotle's chance as a possible cause

The major developer of Stoicism, Chrysippus , took the edge off strict necessity. Like Democritus, Aristotle, and Epicurus before him, he wanted to strengthen the argument for moral responsibility , in particular defending it from Aristotle's and Epicurus' indeterminate chance causes. Whereas the past is unchangeable, Chrysippus argued that some future events that are possible do not occur by Whereas the past is unchangeable, Chrysippus argued that some future events that are possible do not occur by necessity from past external factors alone, but might (as Aristotle and Epicurus maintained) depend on us . We have a choice to assent or not to assent to an action. This is a controversial idea and may be inconsistent with orthodox Stoic doctrines, since it suggests the existence of alternative possibilities and the capacity to do otherwise Chrysippus said our actions are determined (in part by ourselves as causes) and fated (because of God's foreknowledge), but he also said correctly that they are not necessitated, i.e., pre-determined from the distant past. Chrysippus would be seen today as a Chrysippus said our actions are determined (in part by ourselves as causes) and fated (because of God's foreknowledge), but he also said correctly that they are not necessitated, i.e., pre-determined from the distant past. Chrysippus would be seen today as a compatibilist , as was the Stoic Epictetus . He also has a strong element of agent-causalism.

Alexander of Aphrodisias (c.150-210), the most famous commentator on Aristotle, wrote 500 years after Aristotle's death, at a time when Aristotle and Plato were rather forgotten minor philosophers in the age of Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics. Alexander defended a view of moral responsibility we would call libertarianism today. Greek philosophy had no precise term for " free will " as did Latin (liberum arbitrium or libera voluntas). The discussion was in terms of responsibility , what " depends on us " (in Greek ἐφ ἡμῖν). Alexander believed that Aristotle was not a strict determinist like the Stoics, and Alexander himself argued that some events do not have pre-determined causes. In particular, man is responsible for self-caused decisions, and can choose to do or not to do something, as Chrysippus argued. However, Alexander denied the Alexander believed that Aristotle was not a strict determinist like the Stoics, and Alexander himself argued that some events do not have pre-determined causes. In particular, man is responsible for self-caused decisions, and can choose to do or not to do something, as Chrysippus argued. However, Alexander denied the foreknowledge of events that was part of the Stoic identification of God and Nature.

Most of the ancient thinkers recognized the obvious difficulty with chance (or an uncaused cause ) as the source of human freedom. Even Aristotle described chance as a "cause obscure to human reason" (ἀιτιάν ἄδελον ἀνθρωπίνᾠ λογισμῶ).

Modern Classicists and Historians of Philosophy on Free Will

Carlo Giussani

The complete conception of the will according to Epicurus comprises two elements, a complex atomic movement which has the characteristic of spontaneity, that is, is withdrawn from the necessity of mechanical causation: and then the sensus, or self-consciousness in virtue of which the will, illuminated by previous movements of sensation, thought, and emotion, profits by the peculiar liberty or spontaneity of the atomic motions, to direct or not to direct these in a direction seen or selected. (Cyril Bailey translation)

In his 1896 Studi lucreziani (p.126),Giussani put forward the idea that Epicurus' atomic swerves are involved directly in every case of human free action, not just somewhere in the past that breaks the causal chain of determinism. This goes beyond Epicurus and leads to the mistaken conclusion that the swerves directly cause actions

Cyril Bailey

It is a commonplace to state that Epicurus, like his follower Lucretius, intended primarily to combat the 'myths' of the orthodox religion, to show by his demonstration of the unfailing laws of nature the falseness of the old notions of the arbitrary action of the gods and so to relieve humanity from the terrors of superstition. But it is sometimes forgotten that Epicurus viewed with almost greater horror the conception of irresistible 'destiny' or 'necessity', which is the logical outcome of the notion of natural law pressed to its conclusion. This conclusion had been accepted in its fulness by Democritus, but Epicurus conspicuously broke away from him: 'it were better to follow the myths about the gods than to become a slave to the "destiny" of the natural philosophers: for the former suggests a hope of placating the gods by worship, whereas the latter involves a necessity which knows no placation'. Diogenes of Oenoanda brings out the close connexion with moral teaching: 'if destiny be believed in, then all advice and rebuke is annihilated'. If any ethical system is to be effective it must postulate the freedom of the will. If in the sphere of human action too 'destiny' is master, if every action is the direct and inevitable outcome of all preceding conditions and man's belief in his own freedom of choice is a mere delusion, then a moral system is useless: it is futile to tell a man what he ought or ought not to do, if he is not at liberty to do it. Here at all events 'destiny' must be eliminated. It is a more fatal enemy than superstition, for it means complete paralysis: spontaneity — voluntas — must be at all costs maintained. But why, in order to secure this very remote object, should a protest against 'inexorable necessity' be made at this point in the physical system? It would have been easy, one might think, to accomplish the immediate purpose of securing the meeting of the atoms in their fall through space by some device, such as the Stoic notion that all things tend to the centre,' which should not be a breach of the fundamental law of causality, instead of this sporadic spontaneous deviation. And in what sense can this 'swerve' be said to be vital for the freedom of the will, with which Lucretius so emphatically connects it? The answer must be looked for in the very material notions of Epicurus' psychology, which may be briefly anticipated here. The mind (νοῦς) is a concentration in the breast of an aggregate of very fine atoms, the same in character as those which, distributed all over the body and intermingling with the body atoms, form the vital principle (ψυχή). This aggregation of atoms may be set in motion by images, whether coming directly from external things or stored up as an 'anticipation' (πρόληχις) in the mind itself. Suppose, for instance, that in this way there comes before my mind the image of myself walking: ultimately the atoms of the mind being themselves stirred, will set in motion the atoms of the vital principle: they in turn will stir the atoms of body, the limbs will be moved and I shall walk. But before this can happen another process must take place, the process of volitional choice. When the image is presented to the mind it does not of itself immediately and inevitably start the chain of motions which results in the physical movement; I can at will either accept or reject the idea which it suggests, I can decide either to walk or not to walk. This is a matter of universal experience and it must I not be denied or rejected. But how is this process of choice to be explained on purely material lines? It is due, said Epicurus, to the spontaneous swerving of the atoms: the act of volition is neither more nor less than the 'swerve' of the fine atoms which compose the mind. The fortuitous indeterminate movement of the individual atoms in the void 'is in the conscious complex (concilium) of the mind transformed into an act of deliberate will. The vital connexion, indeed the identity of the two processes is clearly brought out by Lucretius at the close of his exposition of the theory: 'but that the very mind feels not some necessity within in doing all things, and is not constrained like a conquered thing to bear and suffer, this is brought about by the tiny swerve of the first-beginnings in no determined direction of place and at no determined time'. It is not merely, as has been suggested, that Epicurus decided to get over two difficult problems in his system economically by adopting a single solution, but that he perceived an essential connexion between them: if freedom is to be preserved, it must be asserted at the very basis of the physical world. The 'swerve' of the atoms is, no doubt, as the critics have always pointed out, a breach of the fundamental laws of cause and effect, for it is the assertion of a force for which no cause can be given and no explanation offered. For if it be said that the atom swerves because it is its nature to do so, that is merely to put 'nature' as a deus ex machina on a level with 'necessity' as it was conceived by some of the early physicists, a force which came in to do what could not otherwise be explained. But it was no slip or oversight on Epicurus' part which a more careful consideration of his principles might have rectified. On the contrary it was a very deliberate breach in the creed of 'necessity' and is in a sense the hinge on which the whole of his system turns. He wished to secure 'freedom' as an occasional breach of 'natural law'. If criticism is to be brought against him, it must not be on the technical ground of inconsistency in this detail, but on the broader ground that in his system as a whole he was attempting the impossible. To escape from the old notion of the divine guidance of the world, the Atomists had set up a materialist philosophy directed solely by uniform laws of cause and effect. Democritus saw that this, if pursued to its logical conclusion, must lead to an unflinching determinism, which with more scientific insight perhaps, but less care for his ethical precepts, he had wholly accepted. Epicurus, unwilling in this way to risk his moral system, tried to escape from the impasse without abandoning a materialist position. Such a compromise is in reality impossible: a wholly materialist view of the world, which excludes altogether the spiritual and the supernatural, must lead to determinism, and there is no real path of escape, except in the acknowledgement of other than material conditions and causes. From the point of view of ultimate consistency, the 'swerve' is a flaw in Epicureanism, but it is not to be treated as a petty expedient to get over a temporary difficulty, or an unintelligent mistake which betrays the superficial thinker. It may not be uninteresting to notice that a parallel difficulty arises for modern thinkers and that a solution not unlike that of Epicurus' atomic swerve has sometimes been propounded.

(Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, pp. 318-321) Of what nature then is this self-initiated movement? In the individual atom it is automatic, spontaneous, and wholly undetermined in occasion or direction. Is the movement of the mind in will merely the result of such a movement in one of its component atoms, or even the sum of many such movements? If so it too must be automatic and undetermined. When the image of action is presented to the mind, it is impossible to foretell in what way the movement will occur, or even whether it will occur at all. In other words the mind is not really self-determined, but is at the mercy of wholly undetermined movements inside itself, and freewill after all its careful preservation turns out to be nothing better than chance. This is indeed the conclusion reached by one modern critic, and it is not to be wondered at that he is unwilling to believe that Epicurus himself can have rested the claim for freewill on the atomic 'swerve'. But the solution of this difficulty lies once again to the Epicurean conception of a compound body (concilium, conciliatus). The compound is more than a mere aggregate of independent atoms: it is their union in a complex, which has a new individuality of its own in which it may acquire qualities and even powers which are not possessed by the individual component atoms. The soul or mind is a compound body of such peculiar constitution in the nature of its component atoms and their motions among themselves, that it acquires the power of sensation or consciousness. The automatic swerve of the individual atoms then is translated in the complex of the mind into a consciously spontaneous movement, in other words into a movement of volition. 'The complete conception of the will according to Epicurus, Giussani argues in an admirable summary of his position, 'comprises two elements, a complex atomic movement which has the characteristic of spontaneity, that is, is withdrawn from the necessity of mechanical causation: and then the sensus, or self-consciousness in virtue of which the will, illuminated by previous movements of sensation, thought, and emotion, profits by the peculiar liberty or spontaneity of the atomic motions, to direct or not to direct these in a direction seen or selected.' In other words the blind primitive 'swerve' of the atom has become the conscious psychic act. It may be that this account presses the Epicurean doctrine slightly beyond the point to which the master had thought it out for himself, but it is a direct deduction from undoubted Epicurean conceptions and is a satisfactory explanation of what Epicurus meant: that he should have thought that the freedom of the will was chance, and fought hard to maintain it as chance and no more, is inconceivable. And if the further question is asked how can a complex of blind spontaneous movements of atoms become the conscious act of volition of the mind, we are only thrown back once more on the ultimate difficulty, which has made itself felt all through this account of the soul. For indeed, if we look back over it, we find that here and there crudities of thought or incoherences in the connexion of ideas have been noted, yet as a whole the general theory is self-consistent and complete; but at the back of it always lies the difficulty which must beset Epicureanism or any other form of materialism: can the movement of insensible particles produce or account for consciousness? That all forms of consciousness have their physical counterpart, that sensation, thought, will are accompanied by material movements of parts of the physical organism is credible, and indeed scientific investigation seems to be revealing this parallelism more and more clearly to us. The more material thinkers of our own time are content to say that consciousness 'supervenes' as an 'epiphenomenon' on the movements of matter: Epicurus went the step farther and was prepared to say that consciousness, sensation, thought, and will are the movements of the soul-atoms. Such an idea is to most modern minds, as it was to the majority of philosophers in Epicurus' day, unthinkable: between the one set of facts and the other there is a great gulf fixed: nothing can bridge the gulf that lies between the most elementary sensation and the atomic vibrations which accompany and condition it. If we accept a purely materialistic system in any form, its conclusions will have to be mutatis mutandis something like those of Epicurus: but he has done nothing to bridge over the abyss or to make the gulf seem less wide. Consequitur sensus, inde voluntas fit, his pupil says glibly, but each time rouses in us the same feeling that this is just what can never be understood. And if it is impossible to accept his account of the nature of the soul and its workings, so the inference from it cannot be admitted. If the soul is a mere atomic complex, a 'body', then no doubt like the body it perishes and cannot have any sort of existence after death. But if that account be unsatisfactory, then the problem of survival remains open: the soul may or may not survive bodily death, but the question cannot be decided on the basis of a purely material analysis. It is impossible in dealing with a material system to refrain from pointing out its fundamental weakness, but in an attempt to estimate Epicurus as a thinker, it is less profitable to quarrel with his base-principles than to think of the superstructure he has built upon them. And once again in examining the account of the soul, for all its weaknesses, we are conscious of the workings of a great mind, capable of grasping alike broad ideas and minute details of elaboration. We are certainly not left with the picture of a moral teacher, who merely patched together any kind of physics and metaphysics to back up his ethical preaching.

(Bailey, The Greek Atomists and Epicurus, pp. 435-37)

In 1928 Bailey agreed with Giussani that the atoms of the mind-soul provide a break in the continuity of atomic motions, otherwise actions would be necessitated. Bailey imagined complexes of mind-atoms that work together to form a consciousness that is not determined, but also not susceptible to the pure randomness of individual atomic swerves, something that could constitute Epicurus' idea of actions being "up to us" (πὰρ' ἡμάς).

David Furley

If we now put together the introduction to Lucretius' passage on voluntas and Aristotle's theory of the voluntary, we can see how the swerve of atoms was supposed to do its work. Aristotle's criterion of the voluntary was a negative one: the source of the voluntary action is in the agent himself, in the sense that it cannot be traced back beyond or outside the agent himself. Lucretius says that voluntas must be saved from a succession of causes which can be traced back to infinity. All he needs to satisfy the Aristotelian criterion is a break in the succession of causes, so that the source of an action cannot be traced back to something occurring before the birth of the agent. A single swerve of a single atom in the individual's psyche would be enough for this purpose, if all actions are to be referred to the whole of the psyche. But there is no evidence about the number of swerves. One would be enough, and there must not be so many that the psyche exhibits no order at all; between these limits any number would satisfy the requirements of the theory. The swerve, then, plays a purely negative part in Epicurean psychology. It saves voluntas from necessity, as Lucretius says it does, but it does not feature in every act of voluntas. There is no need to scrutinize the psychology of a voluntary action to find an uncaused or spontaneous element in it. The peculiar vulnerability of Epicurean freedom — that it seemed to fit random actions, rather than deliberate and purposive ones — is a myth, if this explanation is correct. We can now understand why the swerve gets no mention in Lucretius' account of voluntary action. It gets no mention because it plays no direct part in it. The theory of the swerve asserts merely that our actions are not caused conjointly by the environment and our parentage. There was no need for Lucretius to mention this in his account of the psychology of action, any more than there was for Aristotle to insist on his negative criterion of the voluntary in De Motu Animalium. It may be objected that a swerve in the psyche must have been supposed to produce some observable effect. But not even this is true. We have already glanced at Lucretius' doctrine that the mind has before it innumerable simulacra which never reach the level of consciousness, because the time interval during which they are present is imperceptibly small. But if the impact of those complicated atomic configurations which constitute simulacra could have no observable effect, it is a safe inference that the minute swerve of a single atom would be undetectable. So we can, after all, make use of the Epicurean concept of the concilium in our explanation. I argued previously against Bailey's use of it in saying that "what in the individual atom is a matter of chance, in the conscious complex of the animus is 'conscious chance.'" It is impossible to see how the random motion of an individual atom can by itself account for the end-directed motions of the complex of which it is a part. It is perfectly reasonable, however, that the random motion of a single atom should be concealed by the fact that it is just one element in a complex. The Epicurean psychology of action, if I am right, was in outline as follows. Each person is born with a psyche of a particular character, determined by the proportions of atoms of the four different kinds which constitute a psyche. From the beginning of life, reactions occur between the psyche and the external world, through the medium of atomic eidola which flow from all objects and may reach the psyche through the sense organs and the mind. From the beginning, the child experiences feelings of pleasure and pain; in atomic terms, pain is a disturbance of the motions of the psyche atoms caused by a lack of something, and pleasure is either the restoration of the undisturbed motions which constitute tranquillity, or else the state of tranquillity itself. The child learns to associate external objects with one or other of these feelings. A feeling of something lacking constitutes a motive to make good the lack, and so creates an impulse towards an object in the external world which the child has learned will supply the deficiency. A person's feelings, and therefore his motives and his behavior, are to some extent determined by his genetic inheritance of a psyche of such and such a constitution. But the motions of the psyche (and it is in its motions that all its character and action consists) are not determined ab initio, because a discontinuity is brought about by the atomic swerve. The swerve of an atom or atoms in the psyche means that the inherited motions are disturbed, and this allows new patterns of motion to be established which cannot be explained by the initial constitution of the psyche. There is both continuity and discontinuity. The character of the person is to some extent still determined by the initial constitution of his psyche, because the proportions of atoms of different types in it remain the same. But to a much greater extent his character is adaptable, because the motions of the atoms are not determined and can be changed by learning. A person learns by experience. He learns what desires must be satisfied, and what objects satisfy them, simply by constant repetition of the experience of desire and satisfaction. He can learn by individual trial and error, or by precept and example from others. If he is indoctrinated in the Epicurean philosophy, he learns to distinguish desires which arise from nature and must be satisfied from those which arise from nature but need not be satisfied and from those which do not arise from nature and are best eliminated. He learns that the limit of pleasure is the absence of pain, and so ceases to feel pain through desire for some extra pleasure. His feelings become disciplined, so that an improper object—one that brings more pain than pleasure in the long run—no longer arouses desire in him. He learns not so much to reject some of the things he desires as to cease to desire the things he ought to reject. The wise Epicurean is not to be pictured as asserting himself by repeated "acts of volition" against the temptations of the world, but as having learned not to be tempted. His "freedom" does not consist in being presented with possible alternatives, and in choosing one when he might have chosen the other. It consists rather in the fact that his psyche is the product of his own actions and is not unalterably shaped by some "destiny" from the time before his birth. The weakness of this theory of "freedom," both in its Epicurean and in its Aristotelian form, is to be found chiefly in its refusal to consider the processes of character formation. When Aristotle says that children should be brought up from the beginning to feel pleasure and pain in the right objects, he obviously does not consider such education to be equivalent to compulsion. He stresses that educators and lawgivers use punishments and other incentives to make people behave in the right way, and at the same time insists that the acts which create virtuous dispositions are not to be referred to causes outside ourselves." It is curious that he does not see this as a problem, since it was clearly raised by Gorgias in his Praise of Helen, almost a century before, when he offered as one of his excuses for Helen's behavior the possibility that she was persuaded by argument. It might well have arisen, too, from a consideration of Democritus' ethical opinions. Part of the explanation is probably that persuasion was commonly seen as an antithesis to compulsion? But Aristotle should have seen the need to reestablish this antithesis, since he had to some extent broken it down himself in talking of a class of actions which were a mixture of the voluntary and the involuntary. If Aristotle had seriously examined the reasons why he took the results of education to be "in our own power," he would have been compelled to specify more exactly what he meant by saying "the source is in us." He might then have been led to say that the criterion of morality (that is to say, the criterion that determines whether an action is liable to moral appraisal or not) is to be found precisely in our ability to be influenced by persuasion as opposed to force. If he had stressed this, then I think Epicurus might after all have thought the swerve unnecessary (unnecessary, that is to say, in his psychology; it was still needed in his cosmology). For in his theory, the effects of persuasion would be similarly explained whether the swerve were there or not. Persuasion is by words, and words, in the crude atomism of the time, do their work by collisions, through the medium of the sense organs. The swerve is not needed for them to have this effect. I leave it to others to decide whether the Epicurean theory, without the swerve, would have been "determinist" as opposed to "libertarian," because I do not yet see how to define this particular antithesis. But if it would be determinist, I think it would be a sort of determinism that is compatible with morality.

(Furley, Two Studies in the Greek Atomists, pp.232-236)

In 1967 Furley examined the ideas of Giussani and Bailey and de-emphasized the importance of the swerve in both Epicurus and Lucretius so as to defend Epicurus from the "extreme" libertarian view that our actions are caused directly by random swerves . (Bailey had also denied this "traditional interpretation.") Furley argues for a strong connection between the ideas of Aristotle and Epicurus on autonomous actions that are " up to us ."

In the same year 1967, Huby suggested that Epicurus was the original discoverer of the "freewill problem." Huby noted that there had been two main free will problems, corresponding to different determinisms , namely theological determinism (predestination and foreknowledge) and the physical causal determinism of Democritus.

It is unfortunate that our knowledge of the early history of the Stoics is so fragmentary, and that we have no agreed account of the relations between them and Epicurus. On the evidence we have, however, it seems to me more probable that Epicurus was the originator of the freewill controversy, and that it was only taken up with enthusiasm among the Stoics by Chrysippus, the third head of the school. The outlines of Epicurus' approach are familiar enough. He took over the atomic theory of Democritus almost unchanged, but introduced one significant new point, the swerve of the atoms, a slight change of direction that could occur without any cause. According to tradition this was to solve two problems for him: the change of direction would enable atoms otherwise falling all in the same direction and at the same speed to collide and so enter into larger combinations, and the fact that it occurred without cause would break the otherwise continuous chain of causation and so allow room for freedom of action by men, whose minds were composed of atoms and therefore subject to the same laws as everything else. In spite of the poverty of our evidence, it is quite clear that one main reason Epicurus had for introducing the swerve, or rather the swerve as a random, uncaused event, was as a solution to the problem of freewill. Unlike Aristotle, he fully appreciated that there was a problem. He believed in free will, because it seemed to him manifestly clear that men could originate action, but he could not, like Aristotle, regard this as the end of the matter. We may not think much of the solution he offers, but he deserves full credit for appreciating the problem. There are now two main points to be cleared up: (1) was Epicurus the first to appreciate the problem, or was he anticipated by the Stoics or someone else? (2) If he was the first, how did he come to do so, and what exactly was the nature of the problem as he saw it? ...we have to explain why Aristotle was so resistant to determinism, and Epicurus so impressed by it. The answer must surely lie, in part at least, in their differing attitudes to Democritus. Aristotle was indeed steeped in Democritus, and had a considerable admiration for him, but at the same time found his system quite unacceptable. We can see why this was so. Aristotle's thought was dominated by a teleological view of causality, in which the paradigm of what guides change is the tendency of an organism to develop into a certain kind of thing. This made the idea of a causal chain in which the future is entirely determined by the past strange and irrelevant. ...in Book K (1064b 35) Aristotle takes his stand on the point that we know very well that some things happen kata symbebekos, which is in opposition to ex anankes, and that, in this context, means causally determined in our sense. What happens kata symbebekos is, then, undetermined. Aristotle then had two reasons for rejecting determinism, (i) that some things obviously happened kata symbebekos, and (ii) that men had free will [Aristotle only says some actions are "up to us."] At the same time it is putting it too strongly to say that he rejected determinism: rather it seems that it was for him a non-starter. This is clearly in sharp contrast to the views of Epicurus and the Stoics, both of whom made valiant if unsuccessful attempts to reconcile freedom and determinism. ...the fact remains, on the evidence of Cicero and Lucretius, that Epicurus still ultimately traced the freedom of the will to the swerve of the atoms. How exactly he did this remains a mystery. The philosophical, as distinct from the historical, conclusion of my argument is twofold, first that it was possible for men like Plato and Aristotle to hold many educational and psychological beliefs in common with us without being aware of any freewill problem because they had no notion of thorough-going psychological determinism, and, second, that once the problem had been formulated it was appreciated by philosophers of many different schools throughout later antiquity as if it were indeed a natural problem.

(Pamela Huby, "The First Discovery of the Freewill Problem", Philosophy, 42 (1867), pp.353-62)

Richard Sorabji

Sorabji's 1980 Necessity, Cause, and Blame surveyed Aristotle's positions on causation and necessity, comparing them to his predecessors and successors, especially the Stoics and Epicurus. Sorabji argues that Aristotle was an indeterminist , that real chance and uncaused events exist, but never that human actions are uncaused in the extreme libertarian sense that some commentators mistakenly attribute to Epicurus.

This book centres on Aristotle's treatment of determinism and culpability. One of the advantages of studying Aristotle's treatment of determinism is that we get a sense of what a multiform thesis it is. Arguments from causation are by no means the only ones that have been used to support it, and Aristotle is the grandfather, even if not the father, of many of these arguments. I am not myself convinced by any of the arguments for determinism, nor by the arguments that it would be compatible with moral responsibility. But in order to discuss the question, I shall have to consider some very diverse topics: cause, explanation, time, necessity, essence and purpose in nature. These are all subjects of intense controversy today, and time and again Aristotle's discussions are intimately bound up with modern ones. Often, I believe and shall argue, we can benefit from going back to the views of another period, views which are sometimes refreshingly different from our own. I shall try to explain, when necessary, where those differences lie. The discussion will not be confined to Aristotle. I shall try to supply a historical perspective and a sense of continuity, by seeing how the views of his successors and predecessors fit on to his own. But at the same time it will remain a central aim to build up a picture of Aristotle's own position on determinism and culpability, by tracing it through the many areas of his thought. By determinism I shall mean the view that whatever happens has all along been necessary, that is, fixed or inevitable. I say 'whatever happens', meaning to cover not merely every event, but every aspect of every event — every state of affairs, one might say. I shall make no further attempt to define necessity, although various kinds of necessity will come to be distinguished as we go along. I have deliberately defined determinism by reference, not to causation, but to necessity. I have not defined determinism as a view which denies us moral responsibility. The latter idea, often known as `hard' determinism is comparatively rare, and was rarer still in antiquity. Many determinists have tried to argue that it is not a consequence of their position. I believe that it is a consequence, but not usually an intended one. I have spoken of things as having 'all along' been necessary, because there would be little moral interest in a view which declared that things became necessary at the last moment, or irrevocable once they had happened. Indeed, Aristotle admits the point about irrevocability; what he denies is that everything has been necessary all along. I shall be representing Aristotle as an indeterminist; but opinions on this issue have been diverse since the earliest times... It is not always recognised that Aristotle gave any consideration to causal determinism, that is, to determinism based on causal considerations. But I shall argue that in a little-understood passage he maintains that coincidences lack causes. To understand why he thinks so; we must recall his view that a cause is one of four kinds of explanation. On both counts, I think he is right. His account of cause, I believe, is more promising than any of those current today, and also justifies the denial that coincidences have causes. There is another strut in the causal determinist's case. Besides the view that everything has a cause, he holds that whatever is caused or explicable is necessitated. If this idea is once accepted, he has a powerful argument, already wielded by the Stoics, against the indeterminist: any action that is not necessitated becomes causeless, inexplicable and hence a thing for which no one can be held responsible. On this issue, regrettably, Aristotle is less firm; he wavers on whether what is caused is necessitated. But insofar as he sometimes implies that it is not, we will be better placed, later in the book, to understand the argument of Nicomachean Ethics III 5. In denying that voluntary actions have been necessary all along, Aristotle need not be implying that something is uncaused. The best-known arguments in Aristotle on determinism have to do with time rather than cause. In Int. 9, he tries to reply to the deterministic 'sea battle' argument which is based on considerations of time and truth...I shall distinguish certain further deterministic arguments based on the necessity of the past, or on divine foreknowledge. The only one of these arguments articulated by Aristotle (and opposed by him) is the sea battle argument. But he is a more or less remote ancestor of many of the others, and of some of the answers to them. I shall have shown by the end of Chapter Eight why I think Aristotle an indeterminist. I do not believe that he came close to the determinism of Diodorus Cronus, or of the author of the sea battle, nor that he treated coincidences as necessary. In a later chapter (Fourteen), I shall further deny that he treated all human action as necessary. But it will be time in Chapter Nine to guard against the ascription to him of too extreme an indeterminism. His occasional denials that natural events can ever occur of necessity seem to be contradicted elsewhere. Certainly, his belief that there is purpose in nature does not require, and is not thought by to require, the denial of causal necessitation. To show why such a denial is not required, I shall have to try to show how Aristotle's purposive explanations in biology work. It will be argued that they work in several different ways, and that most of these ways leave Aristotle immune to modern criticisms of purposive explanation in biology. Criticism of Aristotle here has been widepread and vitriolic; I hope to show that it is largely mistaken.

(Necessity, Cause, and Blame, pp. ix-xii)

[If] some of our decisions are not necessitated, it by no means follows that they are uncaused or inexplicable. If this is correct, it should answer the causal determinist's argument that, if some of our decisions are not necessary in advance, they will be inexplicable and mysterious happenings of which we cannot be held responsible. The answer suggested here is that from our decisions being unnecessitated it would not follow that they were inexplicable, or uncaused. The above reflections have implications not only for the common charge against the indeterminist - that he renders decisions inexplicable, but also for some of the premises that are typically used for establishing the determinist's case. For we have been led to doubt the premises that every state of affairs has a cause and that whatever is caused is necessitated. Even these two premises together would not be enough to yield the determinist's view that whatever happens is necessary in advance. To obtain that result, he may appeal to the idea of a sequence of causes: each state of affairs has a prior state of affairs as its cause. If this seems implausible, because the dent in a springy cushion is caused by the contemporary presence of a weight, it will suffice if in any causal chain a proportion of the causes are prior. On the other hand, if the determinist allows that a cause is only a part of some necessitating conditions, he will have to be willing to argue that the complete set of necessitating conditions commonly exists in advance of its effect.

(p. 32)

Aristotle accepted the past as fixed, in the sense that past events were irrevocable. But future events cannot be necessitated by claims about the present truth value of statements about the future. Aristotle does not deny the excluded middle (either p or not p), only that the truth value of p does not exist yet. Indeed, although the past is fixed, the truth value of past statements about the future can be changed by the outcome of future events.Sorabji claims that he can separate necessity from causality, with implications for causal determinism. In particular, he defends indeterminists against the charge that libertarian decisions are unintelligible.

The appeal to the totality of laws and of initial conditions brings us closer to the classic formulation of causal determinism by Laplace. [But], the current state of physics no longer offers the encouragement that was once expected. By an ambitious extrapolation from the successes of Newtonian mechanics in the field of astronomy, Laplace was able to think of science as on the determinist's side. But the majority" of quantum physicists now maintain that their science actually contradicts determinism. or certain micro-events are not made necessary in advance of their occurrence. Sometimes an attempt is made to admit this conclusion, but reduce its interest, by maintaining that indeterminacy at the level of micro-events will not lead to indeterminacy at the level of the large-scale events that concern us in real life. But against this we have already noticed examples of a small-scale indeterminacy being amplified into a large-scale indeterminacy through radio-active material being connected to a bomb or a living organ.

(pp. 35-6) None of this is intended to rule out the causal determinst's view as possible. I do not know how to do that. But it is meant to place an onus on him to argue for his case, if he wants it to seem at all plausible. I cannot say that I think of it at the moment as having any plausibility. And I should certainly hope that it was false. For I believe it is determinism that rules out moral responsibility and other things we believe in. I believe it is a necessary, though a sufficient, condition of our being morally responsible agents that actions should not all along have been necessary. I do not think the indeterminacies of quantum physics help in any direct way to preserve moral responsibility. What is important is that, in the different sphere of human conduct, there should be actions which are explicable without being necessitated.

(pp. 37)

I come now to the question of how determinism is related to involuntariness. Many commentators nowadays hold one or more parts of the following view. Determinism creates a problem for belief in the voluntariness of actions. Regrettably, but inevitably, Aristotle was unaware of this problem, and so failed to cope with it. Indeed, the problem was not discovered until Hellenistic times, perhaps by Epicurus, who was over forty years junior to Aristotle, and who reached Athens just too late to hear his lectures. In Aristotle's time no one had yet propounded a universal determinism, so that he knew of no such theory. His inevitable failure to see the threat to voluntariness is all the more regrettable in that he himself entertained a deterministic account of actions, which exacerbated the problem of how any could be voluntary. I shall argue that this account misrepresents the situation. First, Aristotle is aware of the idea that everything is determined, whether causally or non-causally. He considers a non-causal determinism in Int. 9, and a causal determinism not only in Metaph. VI 3, but also in Phys. II 4, where he remarks that some people had denied that there was such a thing as chance, on the grounds that a cause could always be found for everything (195b36 — 196a11). Admittedly, he takes the falsity of determinism as fairly obvious in Metaph. VI 3, and feels little need to discuss it in NE III, or in GC II 11. Indeed, in the last passage he asks whether all coming to be is necessary, but whether any is. None the less, he does sometimes produce arguments against determinism (Int. 9, 18b26 — 19a22; Phys. II 5, 196b14; GC II 11, 337b3-7). And he also thinks that in the light of its falsity, he needs to do some explaining, and to show how there can be events without a cause (accidental conjunctions, Metaph. VI 3), or how some predictions can avoid being already true (Int. 9, 19a22—b4, on the traditional interpretation). What Aristotle failed to discuss was not determinism, but something that William James was later to call 'hard' determinism,' the view not only is determinism true, but that also, because of it, there is no thing as moral responsibility or voluntary action. The commentators mentioned above are right insofar as they only want to say this. But what is debatable is whether we should see Aristotle's silence about `hard' determinism as simply a failure to see a problem, and how far the subsequent Hellenistic period differed from Aristotle in their readiness to discuss 'hard' determinism. Determinists in antiquity did not make it a triumphant conclusion that all actions are involuntary. Rather, they would have thought it an objection to their view, if they had to banish voluntariness. There is a whole battery of arguments, which turn up in treatise after treatise, urging against determinism, that it would do away with many of our conceptions about conduct and morality. In the De Fato of Alexander of Aphrodisias (fl. c. A.D. 200), where many of these arguments are used, it becomes clear that the Stoics, against whom they were directed, replied not by conceding the point, but by urging that fate did not exclude the standard moral concepts (chs 13-14, 33, 35-8 Occasionally, they seem to have gone over to the offensive, and argued like certain modern philosophers,5 that the standard moral concepts actually presuppose determinism. But... they felt little attraction towards 'hard' determinism, even if their founder Zeno (fl c. 300 B. C.) deployed an argument in an ad hominem way which is used also by hard determinists, that our moral practices are inevitable, whether justifiable, or not (Diogenes Laertius 7 1 23). Most ancients would have said, and so would Aristotle, that, if there is a genuine incompatibility between determinism and voluntariness, this is so much the worse for determinism, not for voluntariness; and even in modern times, 'hard' determinism is much rarer than 'soft'. Aristotle himself, so far from failing to observe any incompatibility between determinism and our ordinary ways of thinking about conduct, actually tended to see such incompatibilities too readily. Moreover, so far from his successors starting a new tradition, they are often simply echoing Aristotle's own comments, when they argue that there is an incompatibility, and that it counts against determinism. We have seen that Aristotle thinks voluntariness incompatible with an action's having all along been necessary, and further that he goes so far as to argue (wrongly) against determinism that it is incompatible with the efficacy of effort or deliberation (Int. 9, 18b31-3, 19a7-8). This latter was echoed in one of the famous named arguments of antiquity, the Lazy Argument, according to which belief in determinism would make us lazy. A related argument, which we have already noticed, appears in NE II 5 (1113b21-30), where Aristotle claims (again wrongly) that since punishment and honours influence conduct, good and bad conduct must be up to us. Aristotle may here have been ignoring, rather than answering, the idea that wicked conduct is determined, and may have been concentrating instead on the point that our conduct is in some way dependent on us. But his successors used arguments like this one in order to attack determinism, and he too might have been willing to use the argument against a determinist, if he had felt himself to be confronted by one. Aristotle often repeats that we do not deliberate about what is necessary (NE III 3, 1112a21-6; VI 1, 1139a13; VI 2, 113967-9; VI 5, 1140a 31—b1; VI 7, 1141b10-11; III 3, 1112a30-1 with III 5, 1113b7-8; EE II 10, 1226a20-30; Rhet. I 2, 1357a8), and only once comes at all close to adding the desirable qualification 'unless we do not realise that such and such a course is necessary'. If determinism is incompatible with deliberation, it will also be incompatible with praxis, the distinctively human kind of action, and with moral virtue, both of which presuppose deliberation. Similar views on the relation of deliberation to determinism reappeared among Aristotle's ancient and modern successors. And they also turned against determinism the comment, which Aristotle makes in another context, that we cannot bestow praise and blame for what happens of necessity (NE III 5, 1114a23-9; EE II 6, 1223a10; II 11 1228a5), although we can bestow honour, e.g. on the gods (NE 1101b10 — 1102a4). Those who think that determinism endangers voluntariness have every right to disagree with Aristotle's view that our ways of thinking about conduct endanger determinism. But they should recognise it as an alternative view. It misrepresents the situation to suggest that Aristotle was merely not yet in a position to appreciate the problem; he would not have agreed that the problem was one for believers in voluntariness. And the succeeding age would have supported him.

(pp. 243-6)

Sorabji considers the suggestions that quantum uncertainty disproves determinism, and he finds that Aristotle described "starting points" (ἄρχαι) for new causal chains that resemble probabilistic quantum events.Finally, although he thinks Aristotle was not aware of the " problem " of free will vis-a-vis determinism (as first described by Epicurus ), Sorabji thinks Aristotle's position on the question is clear enough. Voluntariness is too important to fall before theoretical arguments about necessity and determinism.

R. W. Sharples

Sharples' great translation and commentary Alexander of Aphrodisias On Fate appeared in 1983. He described Alexander's De Fato as perhaps the most comprehensive treatment surviving from classical antiquity of the problem of responsibility (τὸ ἐφ’ ἡμίν) and determinism . It especially shed a great deal of light on Aristotle's position on free will and on the Stoic attempt to make responsibility compatible with determinism.

Although there are passages in which it is recognised that there is something problematic in holding someone responsible for an action that a god has foretold he will perform, it is generally misleading in the interpretation of the literature of the fifth century B.C. and earlier to assume that the difficulty is always as obvious or as important as it seems to us. The mechanistic atomism of Democritus (born 460-457 B.C.) may well seem to us to raise difficulties for human responsibility, and it seemed to do so to Epicurus, but Democritus himself apparently felt no such problem. The question of the relation between destiny and human choice is raised, in mythical form, at the end of the Republic of Plato (c. 429-347B.C.), in a passage that was to be important for later discussion; but it only attains its full significance in the context of a theory claiming that all events in the physical world are governed by a rigid determinism, and this is not present in Plato, for whom what admits of absolute regularity with no exceptions is to be found among the Ideas rather than in sensible phenomena. The classic notion of determinism — of a system in which every state of affairs is a necessary consequence of any and every preceding state of affairs — is almost entirely absent from the approach to the physical world of Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) also; more important for him is the contrast between, on the one hand, the absolute necessity and invariance which applies to the motions of the heavenly bodies, to mathematical truths, and to certain attributes of beings in the sublunary world — the mortality of all men, for example — and, on the other hand, the irregularity and variation of many aspects of the sublunary world, where the most that can be said of many things is that they happen for the most part but not always, and where there are many accidental connections that fall outside the scope of scientific knowledge — concerned with what is always or usually the case — altogether. Aristotle's picture of the consequences of an event is not one of chains of cause and effect interwoven in a nexus extending to infinity...Aristotle can assert that there are fresh beginnings (archai), not confined to human agency, without supposing that there is a deterministic causal nexus occasionally interrupted by undetermined events; he simply does not see the question in these terms. He does discuss the question whether all events are determined by necessary chains of causation at Metaphysics E 3 1027a30 — b14, and there denies this possibility insisting that not everything is necessary; but here as elsewhere it is not clear that he distinguishes between (i) the claim that there are events which are not predetermined, and (ii) the lesser claim that there are some things that do not always happen in the same way — which does not exclude their being predetermined by different factors on each occasion. He certainly holds that there are events which result from chance rather than necessity; but as has often been pointed out his treatment of chance events in terms of coincidence is not incompatible with determinism. He is in fact interested in a different question, that of explanation; it may well be that chance events have no scientific explanation, without their thereby involving indeterminism. It would indeed be rash to claim that there are no passages where Aristotle intends to assert freedom from determinism as later philosophers would understand it; but this is not, in dealing with the universe as a whole, his main concern. And Aristotle's emphasis on other questions, particularly that of the presence or absence of a variation which may well be entirely predetermined, was highly influential on later thinkers, Alexander among them, who were concerned with the problem of determinism. Aristotle did however discuss the issue of the analysis of responsible human action in a way which, although it does not form part of a treatment of determinism in the world as a whole, was nevertheless to be influential when this topic was later discussed. In Nicomachean Ethics III.1 he defines voluntary (hekousion) action as that where there is no external compulsion, so that the source (arche) of the action is in the agent, and where the agent is not ignorant of the particular details of what he is doing. In this chapter he is concerned with the practical, quasi-legal problem of the imputability of actions to their agents, rather than with a philosophical analysis of freedom of choice, but the question of the presence or absence of external compulsion was to be important in later discussion. In Nicomachean Ethics III1.5 Aristotle asserts that responsible actions — those which 'depend on us' — involve the possibility of choosing otherwise (1113b7). He then meets the objection that a man's character may be such that he cannot choose other than actions of a particular sort by arguing that, since dispositions develop as a result of actions, even if a man cannot now choose not to act in a certain way, it is his responsibility that he came to be like this in the first place (1114a3-31). This argument, however, only pushes the problem back into the past, till one comes to influences in our childhood — natural endowment, training and education — for which we can hardly be regarded as responsible. Aristotle is not indeed arguing against the background of a determinist system, and it would be a mistake to press his argument too closely so as to extract deterministic implications from it. It seems that he is operating with basically libertarian assumptions, starting from the position that responsibility involves freedom to choose between different courses of action, and dealing with difficulties arising from the determination of action by character only as a subordinate issue. It is true that 'the possibility of choosing otherwise' could be interpreted in a qualified sense which would make it acceptable to a determinist, but there is no explicit indication of this in Aristotle's text, and it seems likely that such ,attempts to reconcile determinism and responsibility only arose later as a reaction to the explicit assertion of the necessity of choosing between determinism and indeterminism. However, Aristotle's treatment is not entirely satisfactory, and its limitations and difficulties do become apparent when later thinkers, and above all Alexander, use it as a basis from which to argue against determinism. It is with Epicurus and the Stoics that clearly indeterministic and deterministic positions are first formulated. Epicurus (341-270 B.C.) claimed that human freedom could only be maintained in the atomist system by the unpredetermined swerve of certain atoms from the paths which they would otherwise follow. The problems of this position, which seems to reduce responsible human choice to pure randomness, have often been pointed out; however, analogous problems seem involved in any attempt to treat responsibility in terms of the possibility of choosing otherwise, if this is to be combined with a rational explanation of why men do, or should, choose in a particular way. The Stoic position, given definitive expression by Chrysippus (c. 280-207 B.C.), the third head of the school, represents not the opposite extreme from that of Epicurus but an attempt to compromise, to combine determinism and responsibility. Their theory of the universe is indeed a completely deterministic one; everything is governed by fate, identified with the sequence of causes; nothing could happen otherwise than it does, and in any given set of circumstances one and only one result can follow — otherwise an uncaused motion would occur. Fate is also identified with providence and with god, and thus with pneuma or spirit, the divine active principle — or perhaps better the instrument or vehicle of the divine will — which penetrates the entire universe, bringing about and governing all processes within it and giving each thing its character. Chrysippus was however concerned to preserve human responsibility in the context of his determinist system. His position was thus one of 'soft determinism', as opposed on the one hand to that of the 'hard determinist' who claims that determinism excludes responsibility, and on the other to that of the libertarian who agrees on the incompatibility but responsibility by determinism. The Greek to eph' hemin, 'what depends on us', like the English 'responsibility', was used both by libertarians and by soft determinists, though they differed as to what it involved; thus he occurrence of the expression is not a safe guide to the type of position involved. The situation is complicated by the fact that the debate is in Greek philosophy conducted entirely in terms of responsibility (to eph' hemin) rather than of freedom or free will; nevertheless it can be shown that some thinkers, Alexander among them, have a libertarian rather than a soft-determinist conception of responsibility, and in such cases I have not hesitated to use expressions like 'freedom'. The expression 'free will' is employed in discussions of the problem in ancient Latin writers. Chrysippus argued that we are responsible for those actions which, even though they are predetermined, depend chiefly on ourselves rather than on external factors. (Epicurus, by contrast, insisted that free actions must be free not only from external necessity but also from necessitation by factors internal to the agent). Certain ancient authors put forward arguments for praise, blame, punishment and reward in a determinist system with no appeal to responsbility — arguments which may therefore be classified as hard determinist. The wrongdoer should be punished for the protection of others whether or not he is responsible for his actions, just as noxious plants or animals are destroyed. A Stoic source for these arguments cannot be ruled out, for the Stoics may well have reinforced soft-determinist arguments justifying praise, blame, punishment and reward by others not referring to responsibility. In addition to physical, causal determinism one may also speak of 'logical' determinism. In chapter 9 of his De Interpretatione, the famous 'Sea-Battle' passage, Aristotle poses the problem that, if a prediction is either true or false, it seems that what is predicted must in the one case necessarily occur and in the other necessarily not occur. Aristotle's own solution to the problem is obscure. Both Epicurus and the Stoics accepted a connection between the truth or falsity of the prediction and the eventual outcome's being predetermined, Epicurus rejecting determinism and consequently denying that all future-tense propositions are true or false, the Stoics arguing that all propositions are true or false and using this as an argument to support determinism. Carneades (214/3-129/8 B.C.), the founder of the sceptical New Academy, argued against both schools that the necessary connection between the truth of the prediction and the occurence of the event is simply an indication of what is meant by describing a proposition as true, and does not have any deterministic implications. The predominant interpretation of Aristotle's own position in later antiquity was that a prediction of a future contingent event does have a truth value — it is true or false — but not a 'definite' one," this position first appears in the last section of quaestio 1.4 attributed to Alexander, but is not found in the de fato. It was probably advanced as a defence against those who attacked Aristotle as denying that predictions of contingent events had any truth value at all; Cicero indeed attributes this position to Epicurus and not to Aristotle (whom he regards as a determinist), but we know that both Stoics and others had attacked Aristotle for holding such a view. A form of logical determinism which the Stoics however found less acceptable was that involved in the Master Argument of Diodorus Cronus (fl. c. 315-284 B.C.), a member of the Dialectical school.From the premisses 'all that is past and true is necessary' and 'what is impossible does not follow from what is possible,' Diodorus claimed to infer that only what is, or will be, true is possible. Both Chrysippus and his predecessor Cleanthes (331-232 B.C.), however, rejected this conclusion, Cleanthes rejecting the first premiss, Chrysippus the second. For the Stoics there are things that are possible even though they will not happen and even though it is predetermined that they will not. Nevertheless, Cicero (106-43 B.C.), in his de fato, and other anti-determinist critics of the Stoics claimed that this was not compatible with their determinist position, and that they were committed to Diodorus' definition of the possible whether they liked it or not. The issue is really one of the point of view taken. Even in a determinist system it may be useful to distinguish between things which could happen (given certain circumstances) but may or may not actually do so, depending on factors which may be obscure to us, and others which cannot happen at all. But those who are opposed to determinism are likely to find all such distinctions beside the point as long as it is still admitted that the actual outcome in each case is predetermined. Cicero's treatise, of which unfortunately only the later part is extant, apart from a few fragments, is of particular importance for its presentation of the arguments advanced by Carneades, from whom the greater part of the treatise seems ultimately to derive. Just as in the case of the problem of the truth of predictions Carneades endeavoured to show that both the Stoic and the Epicurean position rested on a common misconception, so in the case of physical determinism he argued that there was a middle ground between universal determinism on the one hand, and the occurrence of uncaused events on the other. Chance events are caused, in that they have accidental causes, but not predetermined; human actions are not uncaused because their cause is in the nature of voluntary motion itself. Both these claims are similar to ones made by Alexander. It was probably Carneades, too, who made popular a series of arguments from the alleged practical consequences of determinism, reflected in later authors and among them Alexander (f. XVI-XX). Our information on the place of Carneades in this tradition would probably be much better if we still possessed the lost part of Cicero's de fato.

Alexander throughout speaks as if fate and necessity, for the determinists, were identical; the Stoics may indeed have been prepared in certain contexts to say that all things were necessary, but it does not seem that they laid such emphasis on the necessity of all things as does Alexander in stating his opponents' position. But since Alexander finds his opponents' attempts to separate fate and necessity trivial, from his own point of view his presentation of the determinist position is legitimate. It follows, however, that his statements must be used with considerable caution as evidence for the Stoic position. Alexander's own position becomes apparent not only in the constructive argument of de fato but also in his polemic against the determinists, though the structure of his treatise has the consequence that his own position is not always clear — his arguments against the determinists are often dialectical, and he is concerned to refute them on diverse topics rather than to construct a systematic position of his own. One crucial point that is however clear is that Alexander's own conception of responsibility is a libertarian one. He objects not just to determination of our actions by external causes alone, but to that resulting from a combination of internal and external factors; it is not enough that an individual contributes something to the result, if that contribution is predetermined. This shows that his repeated descriptions of responsbility in terms of the power or capacity for opposite courses of action"' are to be understood in terms of an unqualified, unrestricted possibility. At the same time, like Carneades, he claims to avoid the Stoic charge of introducing uncaused motion. Epicurus is nowhere mentioned in the de fato in connection with determinism, but only with reference to his denial of divine providence; possibly consideration of the Epicurean atomic swerve would have exposed difficulties in Alexander's own position. He stresses the connection between responsibility and reason, which shows that his libertarian conception of responsibility is not just one of arbitrary caprice; at the same time, he faces very real difficulties in combining his libertarian position with an account of the rational element in human behaviour, and does not really solve it. (For the Stoics and Neoplatonists, on the other hand, freedom is located not in the possibility for alternatives but precisely in choosing the most rational course of action.)'"

Sharples thinks that the problem of determinism and responsibility was not realised, in the form in which it was eventually passed on to post-classical thinkers, until relatively late in the history of Greek thought - at least not until after Aristotle.As to the thought of Alexander himself, Sharples notes that in his attack on the Stoics Alexander does not name any individual thinkers and makes his arguments very general.

Don Fowler

[The discussion of the swerve in Book II of De rerum natura] has received brilliant treatment from D. J. Furley in a work which is in many ways a model for the analysis of ancient philosophical texts. Yet it still seems to me that there is more to be said. I want here to try briefly to offer a fresh analysis of the argument of the vital paragraph 251-93, and to situate it within an Epicurean context. Inevitably this will involve criticism of Furley; let me state again at the outset my admiration of his work.

("Lucretius on the Clinamen and 'Free Will'", Συζήτησισ: Studi sull'epicureismo greco e romano offerti a Marcello Gigante, (Naples, 1983), p.330)

I turn to the overall interpretation. Lucretius is arguing from the existence of voluntas to the existence of the clinamen; nothing comes to be out of nothing, therefore voluntas must have a cause at the atomic level, viz. the clinamen. The most natural interpretation of this is that every act of voluntas is caused by a swerve in the atoms of the animal's mind. The σημείωσις of L. 2. 125-41 is exactly parallel; the visible motions of the dust-particles are a σημεῖον [ἀπὸ τῶν φαινομένον] (128 significant) for the invisible atomic motions which are their cause. There is a close causal, physical relationship between the macroscopic and the atomic. Furley, however, argued that the relationship between voluntas and the clinamen was very different; not every act of volition was accompanied by a swerve in the soul-atoms, but the clinamen was only an occasional event which broke the chain of causation between the σύστασις of our mind at birth and the 'engendered' state (τὸ ἀπογεγεννημένον) which determines our actions. Its role in Epicureanism is merely to make a formal break with physical determinism, and it has no real effect on the outcome of particular actions.

(p.338) For Furley, both of these accounts are essentially ones of stimulus and response; action follows automatically upon perception, and the nature of the action is determined by our constitution, the sort of person we are. In accordance with this, he analyses the passage from De rerum natura Book 4 as follows: (1) Simulacra meandi must strike our minds, among the innumerable other simulacra which are always abroad in the air (881-885). (2) The mind must be focussed, as it were, on walking, so that these simulacra form an image while others do not (882-886). (3) Voluntas fit . . . animus sese ita commovet ut velit ire (883, 886). (4) The mind transmits motion to the limbs, bit by bit (887-891). Here the occurrence of voluntas is consequent on the focusing of the mind. But that is not what Lucretius says; a more accurate analysis of the paragraph would be: (1) 881-2. First simulacra strike the mind, as explained previously. (2) 883-5. Next voluntas occurs; for the mind does not begin any action before the process of 'prevision' has taken place. An imago is formed of what the mind anticipates. (3) 886-90. Therefore, when the animus moves itself in such a way as to want to go, straight away it transmits its motion to the anima. Then the anima strikes the body . . . Lucretius is concerned in this passage with how we move when we wish to, not with how we come to wish to move; hence there is no explanation of how voluntas occurs. But there is certainly no evidence for the idea that voluntas is caused by sense perception directly, and hence that there is no room for the occurrence of a clinamen in the soul-atoms. Simulacra are striking our mind all the time, but we do not 'see' them unless we concentrate on them in an ἐπιβολή τῆσ διανοίας, as Lucretius explains in 4. 802-17. What we concentrate on depends on our voluntas. Once the image is clearly visualized — once we have a φαντασία — then indeed the bodily reactions proceed from that automatically. But voluntas comes before, not after, the production of the image; as K. Kleve remarks, 'wir können selbst wählen, welche Bilder wir bemerken wollen, d.h. auf welche Bilder wir unsere Aufmerksamkeit (ἐπιβολή) richten wollen'. Furley argues that we cannot situate voluntas at this stage 'because Lucretius goes to great lengths to give a causal explanation of why the mind focuses on some things rather than others'. The passage referred to is 4. 962-1036, and in particular 973-83. But Lucretius is clearly there describing an exceptional and involuntary experience which offers an analogy for the phenomenon of dreaming. There is no suggestion that that is what ordinary perception and thought, still less action, are like. There is therefore no reason to doubt that in 4. 881-90 Lucretius situates voluntas before the act of ἐπιβολή and therefore no reason to see voluntas as causally conditioned by perception. Ample room is left for the clinamen to fill; and indeed what else could fill it?

(p.341) For Lucretius, voluntas takes place in the mind, the animus, but it is also a purely physical occurrence. There is no disembodied faculty of the will separate from the physical constitution of the animal." Voluntas is not, moreover, in Lucretius' view merely the object of introspection; we can see it occurring in others. It takes place when the mind decides to focus on certain simulacra in an ἐπιβολή τῆσ διανοίας, and is thus situated between sense perception and the formation of a specific φαντασία which leads to action. It is caused by a random swerve in the downward motion of an atom or atoms in the 'fourth substance' of the animus, which causes an alteration in the atomic motions which eventually leads to a specific action. What action, if any, a swerve issues in is determined by which atoms swerve and by the constitution of the animus. On any particular occasion, what action the animal will take is unpredictable, but over a series of actions his reactions to the external world will be broadly consistent with the sort of being he is. This theory has usually been greeted with contempt, in ancient and modern times. And its special problems are undoubtedly immense, quite apart from those which face any traditional account of the will as a distinct psychological phenomenon. But it is also a bold imaginative scheme, and an attempt to produce a precise physical account of puzzling psychological problems; it is surely, other considerations apart, a more interesting theory than a mere rehash of Aristotelianism would have been, however philosophically more respectable. It was not the whole of Epicurus' answer to the problems of human freedom; I have not touched at all on Epicurus' denial of a truth-value to statements about the future, which was designed to refute logical determinism as the clinamen did physical. The relationship between this move and the introduction of the clinamen is not clear, and requires further study. But I hope I have shown that the theory of the clinamen as presented by Lucretius is a self-consistent, reasoned theory in itself, firmly embedded in the Epicurean system as a whole and designed to answer real philosophical problems, rather than merely an awkward embarrassment.

(p.351-2)

(Don Fowler, "Lucretius on the Clinamen and 'Free Will'", Συζήτησισ: Studi sull'epicureismo greco e romano offerti a Marcello Gigante, (Naples, 1983) 329-52)

In his 1983 thesis, "Lucretius on the Clinamen and 'Free Will'," Fowler criticized Furley's limits on the swerve and defended the ancient - but seriously mistaken - claim that Epicurus proposed random swerves as directly causing our actions . This mistaken claim has become common in current interpretations of Epicurus.(The thesis is reprinted as Appendix A in Lucretius on Atomic Motion, 2002, p.407)

A. A. Long and D. N. Sedley

Epicurus' problem is this: if it has been necessary all along that we should act as we do, it cannot be up to us, with the result that we would not be morally responsible for our actions at all (especially A, E 3, F 1, G). Thus posing the problem of determinism he becomes arguably the first philosopher to recognize the philosophical centrality of what we know as the Free Will Question. His strongly libertarian approach to it can be usefully contrasted with the Stoics' acceptance of determinism (see 62). Epicurus certainly saw the Democritean atomism which he had inherited as vulnerable to such a challenge, since it made all phenomena, including human behaviour, fully accountable in terms of rigid physical laws of atomic motion, and hence necessary: see A 2, C 13-14, E 3, G. It is perhaps the most widely known fact about Epicurus that he for this reason modified the deterministic Democritean system by introducing a slight element of indeterminacy to atomic motion, the 'swerve' (on which see also 11H with commentary): E 2-3, F, G. But taken in isolation such a solution is notoriously unsatisfactory. It promises to liberate us from rigid necessity only to substitute an alternative human mechanism, perhaps more undependable and eccentric but hardly more autonomous. Epicurus' remarks in A 1, where 'that which depends on us' (or 'that which is up to us') is contrasted with unstable fortune as well as with necessity, suggest that he meant to avoid this trap. In order to see how, we must defer discussion of the swerve for now..

The swerve is not even mentioned in the surviving papyrus fragments [B,C] of Epicurus' book on the issue of responsibility from which B and C are drawn But the book still sheds abundant light on the question. In C he conducts a running debate with a Democritean determinist. Democritus himself, we are told, simply failed to see the implications of his determinism for human action (C 13-14). Epicurus' principal target in C 2-12, on the other hand, is someone who consciously applies mechanistic determinism to all human behaviour, including his own. He probably has in mind such fourth-century Democriteans as his own reviled teacher Nausiphanes — the heirs of Democritus derided C 13, as perhaps also implicitly in G. (The early Stoics have sometimes been identified as his target, but cf. 62 with commentary; 'natural philosophers', A 2. would not normally be used of Stoics, in any case.) In C 1 Epicurus is arguing that since we start with a wide range of potentials ('seeds') for character development our actual direction of development is not physically predetermined but 'up to us'. There are physical influences, but we can control them (cf. 15D 7-8). If it were they that controlled us, our moral and critical attitudes to each other would make no sense (C 2). This leads him into his anti-determinist digression, which continues until its express conclusion at C 15. The determinist may simply regard these attitudes as themselves necessitated (C 3). But this does not save him from the charge of self-refutation (C 5, and perhaps already in the very fragmentary C 4): his own critical attitude in this very debate still implies what he wishes to deny, that the parties to the debate are responsible for their own views. The determinist will resort to the defence that he is compelled to behave in this way; when challenged once again for continuing to argue, will repeat the defence; and so on ad infinitum. Epicurus' objection to this infinite regress (C 6) is not that it is in itself vicious, but rather that it leaves the inconsistency untouched: at every stage of the regress the determinist's behaviour in continuing to argue his case as if with a responsible agent contradicts his thesis that everything, including our beliefs, is mechanically necessitated. In the second stage of the digression, C 8-12, Epicurus suggests that determinism cannot amount to a substantive thesis about the world, and that its application of 'necessity' to human agency will turn out to be no more than a change of terminology. First (C 8) comes an appeal to 'preconception' (on which as a criterion, see 17 above). We all share a preconception of our own agency as that which is responsible for our behaviour: to defuse the evidential force of this, the determinist would have to show how the alleged preconception has come to embody a faulty 'delineation' (cf. 17E 2, 5) of the facts. (Compare Epicurus' own grounds for dismissing the alleged preconception of the gods as provident, 23B—C below.) If he cannot, the preconception remains valid and the determinist's contribution is merely a new name for it. Second (C 9), his thesis is pragmatically empty. Since he denies us an internal source of self-determination (an 'auxiliary element or impulse in us') he can never expect his arguments to dissuade us from any action. In this Epicurus contrasts him with someone who has a proper grasp (as recommended in A 1) of the difference between the necessitated and the unnecessitated, and who consequently can expect to dissuade us from actions which would involve resisting necessity (C to) perhaps, for example, dissuade us from a vain desire to evade the inevitability of death, because unlike the determinist he can appreciate that while death is necessary our wishes are up to us. Third (C II), the determinist leaves himself no tools for analysing 'mixed' actions (as they are called by Aristotle, Nicomachean ethics in. I), those performed freely but reluctantly in avoidance of a greater evil, since he is unable to distinguish the voluntary from the necessitated elements in them. The final stage of the argument, C 13-14, is pragmatic, appealing to the disastrous practical consequences that would have ensued had Democritus remembered to apply his thesis of universal necessitation to himself. No illustration is given, but one easy example would be the abandonment of decision-making (cf. 55S). It is remarkable how closely the internal structure of this anti-determinist argument matches that of 16A's anti-sceptic argument, with the sequence of a self-refutation challenge (C 3-7; cf. 16A 1), an appeal to preconception and word-meaning (C 8-12; cf. 16A 2-3), and a pragmatic argument (C 13-14; cf. 16A 9-10). So too its function as a digression added late in the book to justify the preceding positive account of psychological causation matches the role of 16A in relation to Lucretius' preceding positive account of sense-perception. None of this is likely to be mere coincidence. For scepticism and the kind of mechanistic determinism envisaged here were seen as joint consequences of Democritus' reductionist atomism. If phenomenal properties were reducible to mere configurations of atoms and void, it seemed to follow that the atoms and void alone were real while the sensible properties were arbitrary constructions placed upon them by our cognitive organs. The result was scepticism about the sensible world, which had become the characteristic stance of most fourth-century Democriteans (see further, 1 and 16). Similarly, if the 'self' and its volitions were reducible to mere sequences of atomic motion in the soul, human action would easily appear to be mechanistic, fully explicable in terms of primary physical laws, with no additional explanatory or descriptive role left for such psychological entities as belief and volition. And that is just the kind of theory under attack in C (cf. especially C 2, 9). Given the extent of this parallelism between scepticism and determinism, and between Epicurus' respective refutations of them, we might expect his own positive alternatives to them to be similarly comparable. And so they are. Just as his answer to scepticism is to affirm the reality of phenomenal properties and the truth of sense-impressions of them (see on 7 and 16), so too his answer to mechanism is to affirm the reality and causal efficacy of the self and its volitions as something over and above the underlying patterns of atomic motion. This plainly emerges from B, despite the lack of context and certain difficulties of interpretation. Epicurus is speaking of self-determining animals. (Volitional autonomy is not restricted to human beings, cf. F 1-2; but elsewhere in the book, j in vol. 2, wild animals seem to be excluded, as lacking self-determination and hence as exempt from moral criticism, though not from hate.) Their misbehaviour is quite explicitly said (B 1-4) to be attributable not to their atoms but to their selves and their 'developments'. The latter term, which is crucial to the entire book's discussion, is explicated at B 5. The kind of 'development' which contributes psychological autonomy is one which is distinct from the underlying atoms in a 'differential' way ('transcen