Tim O'Keefe

In this book, Tim O'Keefe reconstructs the theory of freedom of the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus (341-271/0 BCE). Epicurus' theory has attracted much interest, but our attempts to understand it have been hampered by reading it anachronistically as the discovery of the modern problem of free will and determinism. O'Keefe argues that the sort of freedom which Epicurus wanted to preserve is significantly different from the 'free will' which philosophers debate today, and that in its emphasis on rational action it has much closer affinities with Aristotle's thought than with current preoccupations. His original and provocative book will be of interest to a wide range of readers in Hellenistic philosophy.

Metaphysics Epsilon 2-3 and Nicomachean Ethics III 5 (1114b3-25) are often cited in favor of indeterminist interpretations of Aristotle. In Metaphysics Epsilon Aristotle denies that the coincidental has an aitia, and some (e.g., Sorabji) take this as a denial that coincidences have causes. In NE III 5 Aristotle says a person's actions and character must have their origin (archê) in the agent for him to be responsible for them. From this, some conclude that Aristotle thinks a person can be the uncaused cause of his actions, (e.g., Hardie, Ross), or at least that there must be some sort of break in the causal nexus, so that the person's character cannot be traced back to an external origin (Furley). I argue that Metaphysics Epsilon does not show that Aristotle disbelieves in causal determinism, since he is dealing with issues of explanation in these passages, not causal necessitation. Metaphysics Epsilon 2-3 is not irrelevant to the controversy between compatibilist and incompatibilist interpretations of Aristotle, however. I will argue that a proper understanding of Metaphysics Epsilon's doctrine that the sumbebekos lacks an aitia sheds light on what Aristotle means in NE III 5 when he says that the voluntary must have an internal origin, and that it helps to show how one's action and character can have an 'internal origin' even if one's actions and character can be traced entirely to external causes. Finally, I will take this doctrine of the voluntary having an 'internal origin' and use it to illuminate Aristotle's discussion of the different types of excusing conditions in NE III 1.

Because of the "swerve," it is often thought that Epicurus is the first philosopher to offer a libertarian solution to the so-called "problem of free will." I argue that Epicurus is not a libertarian. The rest of Epicurus' philosophy is incompatible with libertarianism. Epicurus is a materialist and a reductionist. Only atoms and void exist per se, and all events are explicable in terms of the mechanical interaction of atoms. This reductionism holds in his philosophy of mind also: the mind is identified with a group of atoms, and mental events are identified with atomic events. It would be difficult to accommodate a libertarian version of agent-causation with such views. I also engage in a close reading of On Nature 25 and argue that it does not support David Sedley's contention that Epicurus is here asserting the causal independence of the self from the atoms. ;Using Cicero's De Fato as my main source, I maintain that Epicurus is an incompatibilist of a certain sort, but that his concerns differ significantly from those of modern libertarians. He is not trying to show that the agent "could have done otherwise" as a necessary condition of moral responsibility. Instead, he is trying to solve the problem Diodorus Cronus poses in the "Master Argument" and Aristotle addresses in De Interpretatione 9, the seeming incompatibility of logical determinism and deliberation: e.g., if it has always been true that there will be a sea-battle tomonrow, how can my deliberating about it now make a difference? Epicurus' response to this problem is similar to Aristotle's: he undercuts the determinist's arguments by denying that all statements about the future presently have a truth-value. The swerve is his means of doing so, since Epicurus thinks that causal determinism and logical determinism are inter-entailing. Given the swerve, there do not presently exist sufficient conditions for the truth of all statements about the future. The swerve thus preserves contingency in the universe, which is a precondition of effective deliberation, but it plays no direct role in Epicurus' action-theory