ABSTRACT
Stoicism was one of the most in uential philosophical schools of the Hellenistic era, the centuries following the death of Alexander the Great in 323 bce (and of Aristotle in 322 bce). The Stoics made pioneering contributions to logic, in their invention of propositional logic; to ethics, in their championing of virtue as the sole intrinsic good and vice as the sole intrinsic evil; and to many other elds. They are also responsible for devising a sophisticated compatibilist theory of free will, the rst clearly compatibilist theory that we know of. Earlier philosophers such as Aristotle also had in uential and thoughtful discussions of issues concerning moral responsibility and causal determinism. But even though Aristotle’s theory of moral responsibility may be best understood as compatible with compatibilism about free will and determinism (see Meyer 2011 for an excellent interpretation of Aristotle along these lines), Aristotle does not squarely address the issue of whether free will and causal determinism are compatible. Some interpreters have thought that Aristotle’s position entails incompatibilism, although he does not explicitly state that free will and determinism are incompatible.
