Hugh Hunter, PhD Philosophy, University of Toronto
'Goodbye Epicurus: Plotinus and His Part in the Forgetting of the Only Good Materialist Account of Free Will that the Ancient World Ever Produced'
In book one of his Enneads, Plotinus discusses a theory of the motions of atoms which can only be the Epicurean atomic swerve. The swerve is the view, found in many Epicurean sources, that atoms occasionally move for no reason at all, and was (somehow) associated with free will.
Plotinus gives a simple but powerful argument, which shows that the random swerving of atoms could never give rise to free will. Much of later commentary and scholarship, especially that on Epicurus, has assumed that Plotinus accurately diagnoses an Epicurean problem.
As part of a larger project on Epicurean free will, I argue here that Plotinus’ critique is a good argument based on a faulty assumption. What Plotinus says allows us to extract a view of how he thought that swerving atoms and free will hung together. But that is the faulty assumption: evidently Plotinus either lacked access or interest in the authentic Epicurean account.
Far from the account so effectively attacked by Plotinus, I contend that the Epicurean swerve was, as my title suggests, the only good materialist account of free will that the ancient world ever produced. Thus Plotinus should be read not as the first to make an original critique of the great hedonist, but as the locus classicus for a misunderstanding that has, alas, had a greater impact than the idea it misrepresents.