Determinism, Freedom, and Moral Responsibility: Essays in Ancient Philosophy, by Susanne Bobzien

Abstract

This outstanding collection of nine essays, all previously published between 1997 and 2014 (though chapter 8 includes important additional material), beautifully complements two other books of exceptional quality. The first is Bobzien (1998) (for a review of which see Inwood (2000)); the other is Coope (2020). In one sense Coope’s book picks up chronologically where Bobzien’s book leaves off, and in another sense it stands beside it, as it engages primarily with late Platonism, a school that approaches these central philosophical questions from a significantly different standpoint than that taken by the Peripatetics, Stoics and Epicureans who are the focus of Bobzien’s essays. As Bobzien notes in her introduction (p. 12), there is a metaphysical basis for the difference in approach taken by Platonists and by the other schools: It is the separability of an incorporeal soul from the body that brings the theories and debates on...