Michael Frede - A free will : origins of the notion in ancient thought

Michael Frede's untimely death in 2007 marked off a forty-year era in the study of ancient philosophy upon which he has left his unique mark. This imprint owed much to his intellectual persona. At Gttingen (1966-71), Berkeley (1971-76), Princeton (197691), Oxford (19912005), and, in his final years, Athens (20052007), he was a magnet to younger scholars, many of whom have gone on to become leaders in the field. For them and others he set an inspiring example by his dialectical practice of live discussion, which, provided that it was accompanied by sufficient coffee and cigarettes, was liable to continue hour upon hour without limit. He was unfailingly supportivrre of his countless former students, in many of whom the spirit and style of his scholarship live on.

For the wider world, however, his writings were the primary conduit of his influence. They started with Prdikation und Existenzaussage (1967), his seminal monograph on Plato's Sophist, and continued through his superlative book on Stoic logic (1974), his celebrated commentary (coauthored by Gunther Patzig) on Aristotle, Metaphysics Zeta (1988), innumerable articles and chapters, three edited collections, a translation (with Richard Walzer) of Three Treatises on the Nature of Science by Galen, and a volume of Frede's reprinted papers (1987), to which further volumes are now to be posthumously added. The present book further enlarges, perhaps even crowns, that remarkable corpus of work.

From the twelve centuries during which Greco-Roman philosophy flourished, there are few thinkers or topics whose understanding has not been enriched by Frede's publications. A full list would be tediously long. Plato and the dialogue form; Aristotelian category theory and metaphysics; Stoic logic, grammar, ethics, and epistemology; Pyrrhonist skepticism; and Galen's theology are no more than examples of the subjects whose understanding has been permanently transformed by Frede's now classic studies. I do not mean by this that he has definitively solved the major historical or exegetical problems; his views have as often as not generated new controversy. Rather, his example and contribution have dramatically clarified the issues and raised the level of debate, introducing entirely new perspectives and interpretative options.

Frede was invited to be the eighty-fourth Sather Professor of Classical Literature at his former university, the University of California, Berkeley, in 1997-98. The professorship requires its holder to give six lectures that will later be published by the University of California Press in its Sather Classical Lectures series, which includes such celebrated works as E. R. Dodds, The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), and Bernard Williams, Shame and Necessity (1993). As Tony Long explains in his preface, although the lectures were extremely well received, Frede did not feel ready to publish them before extending his research further. But as readers will quickly discover, the quality of the text that he has bequeathed fully matches the brilliance and incisiveness for which all his work is admired.

The origin of the concept of will, and more specifically free will, has been endlessly debated, and the inconclusiveness of the debate has mirrored the philosophical indeterminacy of the concept itself. Frede's strategy is to avoid any initial presuppositions about the term's precise meaning and instead let his understanding of it emerge from the texts. This leads him to set Aristotle aside (albeit in a characteristically illuminating chapter) and to shift the focus firmly to Stoicism, arguing that it was in Epictetus that the earlier Stoic theory of assent, enriched with a now developed notion of an inner life, led to the first philosophical concept plausibly identifiable as free will. Much of Frede's past work on Stoic psychology is fruitfully redeployed in securing this result. Later chapters are devoted to showing how the underlying Stoic notion, despite not being able to commend itself in unmodified form to Platonism and Aristotelianism, was the one that ultimately found its way into Christian doctrine.

In addition to its potential to become a landmark in the historiography of philosophy, this book displays the familiar magic of Michael Frede's writing at his usual best. One of the earliest lessons he learned, he once told me, was not to dress up as complicated anything that is fundamentally simple. And that capacity for putting across a powerfully illuminating perspective without the least pretension, but with a winning combination of lucidity, patience, and penetratingly sharp vision, will be found to be on display once more in the pages that follow.

David Sedley