Ennead VI.8: On the Voluntary and on the Free Will of the One
by Plotinus, Kevin Corrigan, and John D. Turner
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“Ennead VI.8 deals with two connected sets of questions about freedom: questions about what it is for human beings to be free and questions about what it is for a god (and in particular, the highest god, the One) to be free. With regards to human beings, he asks what it is for our actions to be in our control, or ‘up to us’. Plotinus ends up arguing for a very constrained picture of what it is for our actions to be up to us: we’re not properly in control of what we do when we’re ignorant or when we act on false beliefs. But even when we act on true beliefs, our actions aren’t properly speaking ‘up to us’ unless they are based on knowledge of what we should do.” Read more...
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