Stoic News

By Dave Kelly

Friday, October 16, 2026

Fate and Determinism: One Inheritance. A Study Note v0.1

 

Fate and Determinism: One Inheritance. A Study Note v0.1

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

I. Beginning

The chain: everyone wants happiness; complete happiness must lie wholly within control; only assent does; happiness is correct assent. C2 says assent is my own doing and not the unfolding of what came before. Canonical numbering: C1 Substance Dualism, C2 Libertarian Free Will, C3 Ethical Intuitionism, C4 Foundationalism, C5 Correspondence Theory, C6 Moral Realism.

So one trait is traced: every event, assent included, follows necessarily from antecedent causes. Part One is history and is not Sterling’s. Part Two is his argument.

II. Part One: The Descent (outside the corpus)

The doctrine

  • Leucippus. His one surviving sentence, from On Mind, denies that anything happens at random and puts everything down to reason and necessity. The source that preserves it says he held that all occurs by necessity, and that this is the same as fate.
  • Chrysippus. He defined fate as a natural, everlasting ordering of the whole, each set of things following on another. Other schools objected that wrongdoing would then belong to fate and not to the wrongdoer; he answered that all things are tied to fate, yet minds are subject to it according to their own quality.
  • Cicero. Quintus, stating the Stoic case, defines fate as the orderly succession of causes, so that one who knew the links could foretell every event. Time is likened to a rope unwinding, bringing nothing new.
  • Augustine. With those who mean by fate the whole connection of causes, and ascribe it to God’s will, he declines to quarrel over a word. Our wills are themselves placed within the order of causes that God foreknows.
  • Leibniz. He distinguishes a Mahometan, a Stoic and a Christian fate, and accepts the last as the destiny of everything under God’s foreknowledge and providence.
  • Laplace. An intelligence knowing all forces and positions at one instant would find nothing uncertain, the future as present to it as the past. This is Quintus’s knower of causes.

The words

  • Fate. Latin fatum is the thing spoken by the gods, from fari, to speak, PIE *bha-.
  • Heimarmenē. Thought to be a participle of meiresthai, to receive as one’s lot, from the root of moira. That root is PIE *(s)mer-, to get a share.
  • Determinism. From determinare, to bound or set limits, from terminus. The English word dates to 1846, for the doctrine that human action is necessitated; the general causal sense dates to 1876, by way of French from German Determinismus, perhaps formed from Praedeterminismus.

What differs, and what physics shows

  • For the Stoics causes are bodies and effects incorporeal; modern accounts put cause and effect in one category. The modern form is stated through laws of nature and the state of the world at a time.
  • The standard reference calls the idea ancient, first treated mathematically in the eighteenth century, and reports no agreement on whether it is true or can even be known. Classical mechanics admits breakdowns, quantum theory is deterministic or not by interpretation, and the survey of physical theories does not tell us whether our world is deterministic.

III. Part Two: Sterling Primary, by Date

  • 19 Sep 2005 (Core Stoicism, Th21 note). Strict determinism “would mean that even acts of vice were somehow correct, and are not actually in our control in any important sense. But I don’t think strict determinism about internal states is a core belief of Stoicism.”
  • 7 Apr 2017 (carried). “Only if I have real free will, free will that takes me away from the chain of necessity, can it make any sense to talk about ‘guidance’ or ‘craft’ or what we ‘ought’ to do.”
  • 17 Apr 2017 (carried). Soft determinism “is incoherent.” “I argue for ‘3’, but I think those arguments are inconclusive.”
  • 4 and 6 Sep 2019 (carried). Chrysippean determinism “is corrosive with respect to Stoicism.” “Please do not pretend that belief in free will is classic Stoic doctrine.”
  • 18 Aug 2021.
    • On Chrysippus, my assent and rain in Spain do not differ: “Given the state of the universe 3,000,000 years ago, each was inevitable.”
    • The same holds of Zeus: “nothing whatsoever is really in the control, even of the very gods.”
    • “Many, like Chrysippus, have done so by subjecting AR to PC.”
    • Later Stoics “appear to back away from his explicit determinism.”
    • Quantum indeterminacy “doesn’t really matter.”
    • Of causal closure: “we have no substantial evidence in favor of this idea.”
    • “I don’t claim that it is a Stoic solution.”

IV. Corpus Synthesis

  • The Argument v1.0 §2 (carried): a determined act of will is a happening, not a doing.
  • CPA Run — Chris Fisher v1.0, P4: Stoic fate is providential, not the causal determinism of modern science. The run’s boundary declaration leaves the historical accuracy of that reading unruled.

V. Readings

  • R1. One trait is inherited. Fate and determinism both hold that assent follows necessarily from what came before.
  • R2. Fate is sibling and parent. Leucippus’s necessity is older than both and was already called fate. Determinism also descends through the Stoic chain of causes.
  • R3. The trait kept its place while the dress changed: the gods’ utterance, the chain of causes, God’s foreknowledge, the law of nature. Fisher’s P4 is correct about the dress.
  • R4. The dress does not bear on control. That is Sterling’s Zeus argument (2021).
  • R5. Sterling’s own word puts Chrysippus and scientific determinism under one head, “subjecting AR to PC,” and states Chrysippus in the modern formula.
  • R6. The words share no root. They share a sense: spoken, allotted, bounded. In each the outcome is settled beforehand, and not by the agent.
  • R7. “Archaic” here means older than its supposed evidence. The doctrine was complete in Chrysippus. The physics credited with proving it came two thousand years later and does not prove it.
  • R8. Unproven cuts both ways. Physics has not refuted it either.
  • R9. Contrary to the chain. This is Sterling’s own claim (2005, 2017, 2019).
  • R10. Wrong is argued, not shown. The arguments are the unchosen character, the unevidenced closure, and “ought.” Their author marks them “inconclusive.”
  • R11. The age charge rebounds. The objection Gellius records against Chrysippus is Sterling’s objection, so the opposition is as old. This note does not argue from age to falsity.
  • R12. The thesis that holds: inherited, unproven, and contrary to the chain.

VI. Corrections Stated

  • The sketch this note develops dated the German word to the 1780s. The source checked gives German “determinist” by 1802 and English “determinism” 1846. The 1780s date is withdrawn.
  • Heraclitus, Diodorus, Lipsius, Hobbes, Spinoza and the predestination disputes were named in the line without checking. They are removed and listed below.
  • Daltrey was named with Fisher. No Daltrey run is in Project Knowledge, so he is removed.
  • The sketch said the corpus rules on Epicurus’s swerve. That document was not opened. Sterling’s 2021 word on quantum indeterminacy replaces it.

VII. Open Items

  • De Divinatione 1.125–127 is a section reference from memory, as is 1814 for Laplace. The SEP cites the 1820 printing.
  • One source numbers the Leucippus fragment DK 67 B1, others B2.
  • The PIE root of terminus is unchecked.
  • Heraclitus, Diodorus, Lipsius, Hobbes, Spinoza and the predestination disputes are unchecked as members of the line.
  • Whether Fisher’s reading of the school is historically correct is not settled here.
  • R3, R6 and R7 are this note’s own readings. No corpus document states them.
  • Sterling’s 2017 and 2019 posts were not reopened.

VIII. Sources

Opened in full: the corpus document “Free Will and Causation” (Sterling’s post of 18 Aug 2021); Core Stoicism (Sterling, 19 Sep 2005); C2 — What the Commitment Carries: A Study Note v0.1; CPA Run — Chris Fisher v1.0.

Carried from C2 — What the Commitment Carries: A Study Note v0.1: Sterling’s posts of 7 and 17 Apr 2017 and 4 and 6 Sep 2019; The Argument v1.0 §2.

Not opened: Classical Ideological Audit — Epicureanism (not used).

Outside the corpus. The SEP entry was opened in full. The rest were read as search excerpts.

Theoretical foundations: Grant C. Sterling (Eastern Illinois University). Analysis and synthesis: Dave Kelly. Prose rendering: Claude (Anthropic). 2026.

posted by Dave | 1:47 PM

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