Epictetus, the Early Stoics, and Frede’s Argument for the First Notion of a Will

Michael Frede has argued that there is a minimum belief for a Stoic to have a notion of a will and that Epictetus and the late Stoics were the first to have this belief. Against Frede’s interpretation, I argue for a new understanding of what the Stoics believed. Epictetus did not believe, as Frede argues, that adult human beings choose to assent to impulsive impressions. This gets the object of choice wrong in the minimum belief. He believed that the choice adult human beings make is to exercise their ability to use their impressions, and I argue that the early Stoics probably believed this too.