Soft Determinism and Freedom in Early Stoicism

Abstract

In her paper 'Freedom, Causality, Fatalism and early Stoic philosophy Dr. Sophie Botros challenges assumptions that have perhaps too readily been taken for granted in recent discussions, and makes important suggestions about the perspective from which we should approach Stoic thought on these topics. It is therefore all the more necessary to examine her conclusions and consider whether they are all equally convincing. B. is right to emphasise (p. 275) that attempts to assess the Stoic position in terms of the modern debate between compatibilists and incompatibilists, soft-determinists and libertarians, run the risk of obscuring the distinctive perspectives of Stoic thought. She is right to doubt whether the Stoic conception of causation can be fully captured in the terms of modern post-Humean formulations of determinism,2 and to emphasise both the fact that the Stoics may have regarded causes as constraining their effects3 and also the teleological and pantheistic aspects of Stoic determinism. Perhaps, though, the conflict which B. sees (pp. 279-280) between the chain of causes and causation by the divine is an unreal one. For Stoic pantheism identified God with the active principle which is present in all things and makes them what they are and is particularly linked, as nveiipa, with the principal cause of a thing's behaviour and hence of its effects on other things.4 Indeed, when B. suggests that we might assume that a teleological account can in principle always be reduced to a deterministic one (p. 280), it is arguable that for the early Stoa the reduction would, if anything, operate in the other