Problems in Middle-Platonist Compatibilism
As Middle Platonists re-founded Platonist school philosophy, primarily during the 1st two centuries AD, they often addressed Post-Platonic issues while drawing on Platonic material, as is particularly well illustrated by their theory of the compatibility of Fate and what depends on us .
Stoics from Chrysippus and onwards held that all things happen according to Fate, a thesis that seemed to others to imply an unacceptable form of determinism. The Middle-Platonist theory, drawing particularly on the choice of lives section of the myth of Er of Plato's Republic X, holds, in analogy with civil laws, that Fate includes all things, but some things as hypotheses and others as consequences . Only the latter are determined by Fate. Among the former, some things causally depend on us . Thus, "what depends on us" is included in Fate, but not determined by Fate. The theory thus claims to save our intuitions on the explanation of action and moral responsibility.
The project analyzes the central problems in recent discussions of the theory: Are the hypothetical causal relations between types or tokens? Is it choices or rather actions that are non-determined? What notions of necessity and possibility are involved? How and why does the theory differ from its contemporary Plato-reception with a more pessimistic view of embodied agency? Does the theory involve, as recently claimed, the Stoic notion that the Universe cyclically repeats itself, so that our actions are predetermined?
Stoics from Chrysippus and onwards held that all things happen according to Fate, a thesis that seemed to others to imply an unacceptable form of determinism. The Middle-Platonist theory, drawing particularly on the choice of lives section of the myth of Er of Plato's Republic X, holds, in analogy with civil laws, that Fate includes all things, but some things as hypotheses and others as consequences . Only the latter are determined by Fate. Among the former, some things causally depend on us . Thus, "what depends on us" is included in Fate, but not determined by Fate. The theory thus claims to save our intuitions on the explanation of action and moral responsibility.
The project analyzes the central problems in recent discussions of the theory: Are the hypothetical causal relations between types or tokens? Is it choices or rather actions that are non-determined? What notions of necessity and possibility are involved? How and why does the theory differ from its contemporary Plato-reception with a more pessimistic view of embodied agency? Does the theory involve, as recently claimed, the Stoic notion that the Universe cyclically repeats itself, so that our actions are predetermined?