ABSTRACT
The aim of this chapter is to challenge the premise of D. Frede’s “bypass” argument, viz., the premise that Aristotle has no concept of a will. As early as 1923, W.D. Ross remarks that “it has often been complained that the psychology of Plato and Aristotle has no distinct conception of the will” (Ross 1923: 199). Ross maintains that Aristotle shares “the plain man’s belief in free will” (sic), though he complains that Aristotle “did not examine the problem very thoroughly, and did not express himself with perfect consistency” (1923: 201). The French scholar René-Antoine Gauthier is more emphatic in his rejection of the idea: “in the psychology of Aristotle the will does not exist” (Gauthier and Jolif 1970: 218). In Three Rival Versions of Moral Enquiry , Alisdair MacIntyre equally dismisses the thought of a notion of will in Aristotle: “Aristotle, like every other pre-Christian author, had no concept of the will and there is no conceptual space in his scheme for such an alien notion in the explanation of defect and error” (MacIntyre 1990: 111). In his posthumously published Sather lectures, A Free Will – Origins of the Notion in Ancient Thought (2011), Michael Frede concurs with this judgment about Plato and Aristotle, but denies that the notion of will is due to Christian in uence. Challenging Albrecht Dihle’s claim in The Theory of Will in Classical Antiquity (1982) that Augustine discovered the will, he instead attributes the discovery to the Roman Stoic Epictetus (c. ad 55-135) and his account of rational assent ( sunkatathesis ). Although Aristotle, according to M. Frede, had a notion of willing ( boulêsis ), he lacks the speci c notion of willing required for a concept of the will ; namely the view that whenever we do something of our own accord, or voluntarily ( hekôn ), we do so through an act of will. It is only when we hold that all voluntary actions have volitions as their immediate cause, whether the act is motivated by rational or non-rational desire, that we have a notion of will. Augustine is heir to this Stoic notion rather than the discoverer of the will in his own right, says M. Frede.
