[MD] Free Will (footnotes to Plato)

[Matt Kundert]

When I took a class called "Free Will and Determinism" some years ago, we began with Aristotle's discussion of fatalism (something about a ship).  Ancient Greek tragedy defined the notion of "tragic" by outlining clashes between compulsions of the sort we call "fate," which Aristotle then made a philosophical puzzle out of.

Theology, beginning with particularly St. Augustine, however began to greatly morph the notion of freedom and its relationship to moral responsibility, principally by creating a notion of "will" that some argue is missing in the ancient Greek.

The best discussion I know of is Bernard Williams' Shame and Necessity.  He begins by refining what is meant by "the Greek's had no notion of will" and what that means for moral philosophy.  Since the freedom to act had become so central to moral thinking (particularly after Kant), some took the Greeks to be somewhat useless for thinking about morality.  Williams' general line of thought is "so much the worse for this thing called 'morality'" and goes on to constitute the "ethical life" as something other (i.e. other than the Christian dispensation).  Because what we need is a notion of agency that disabuses us of the notion of that we can just up and change our mind (sour grapsesism doesn't count--that's just an expression of displeasure whose precondition is the thing you're denying), yet still account for constrictions on choice between options that are "beyond our control," i.e. we need a notion of agency that avoids decisionism but does make us accountable for some though not all actions that initiate causal chains.

Matt

> His all,
> 
> Where did this question of free will versus determinism originate in
> the history of philosophy? I've been thinking of free will as a
> Christian theology "extra-added ingredient" to each human animal that
> is used to explain the problem of evil (unsatisfactorily). Theologians
> needed this term to answer those who thought deeply enough to ask,
> yeah, okay, evil came from Satan, but where did Satan come from? If if
> all philosophy is footnotes to Plato, perhaps the issue is older than
> Christian theology.
> 
> Best,
> Steve