The Postmodern Peripatetic

Chapter 1 of Aristotle’s Categories (traditionally placed first in the corpus) introduces the distinction between univocity and non-univocity.

I began this blog in 2019, envisioning an expanding spiral.

This will conclude the chapter on Epictetus in Boulnois’s investigation into the origins of the concept of free will.

Continuing with Boulnois’s history of free will, the next exploration concerns the way that Epictetus uses the originally Aristotelian phrase “what depends on us”.

The next stage of development in Boulnois’s historical argument about free will focuses on the late Stoic Epictetus (d. 135 CE).

Boulnois sums up the results of the investigation into Aristotelian ethical proairesis (resolution, or “choice”) and the ambiguities of freedom as follows.

“Resolution is an act of the agent.

“Resolution” is Olivier Boulnois’s recommended translation for what I have still been calling the “choice” associated with deliberation in Aristotle’s ethics.

I don’t like arguing in terms that are primarily negative, but found myself doing just that in the course of recent work on Schneewind’s The Invention of Autonomy.

After all the troubled waters of late with voluntarism and free will, it’s time for a breath of fresh air.

There is a great deal more of interest in J.

Schneewind dedicates the final section of his chapter on the Cambridge Platonists to their views on the vexed topic of free will.