Deliberation, faith, and freedom in Alexander of aphrodisias and clement of Alexandria

This dissertation fits into the larger investigation of the historical development of the concepts of freedom and volition in antiquity. It is oriented toward a question addressed by Albrecht Dihle and Michael Frede concerning the origins of the concept of free will as either a Christian or a Stoic contribution.;As the concepts of freedom and volition are very broad, the present work does not attempt an exhaustive treatment. It does not claim to find any particular moment at which free will came into being as a usable concept, since Dihle and Frede have already established two very plausible starting points for use as markers of free will's development. Rather, this dissertation presents additional evidence for the better understanding of one particular chronological stage lying between Frede's Epictetus and Dihle's Augustine. I will focus on the head of the Alexandrian Christian intellectual circle, Clement, in comparison with the head of the imperially-funded Peripatetic Lyceum, Alexander of Aphrodisias, at the turn of the third century CE.;These authors bear two similarities to each other which in turn distinguish them from the model of freedom discussed by Dihle and Frede. First, Alexander and Clement each explain responsibility and moral progress in terms of a precognitive act, deliberation or faith respectively, by which a person is responsible for engaging or not engaging the intellect toward right conduct. Second, they both specify that whether one performs this precognitive act is not predetermined by any antecedent causes. In this they develop a distinct indeterminist notion of freedom to do otherwise that is a very different kind of freedom from that developed by Epictetus and Augustine.;These two authors are significant to this larger investigation of free will's provenance for two further reasons. One is the prominent use they make of Aristotle's texts in addition to their continued use of Stoic categories. The other is the fact that the Christian Clement and the Peripatetic Alexander each integrated Aristotelian and Stoic psychology into a fairly similar---and novel---account of human responsibility and moral progress at about the same time.