Free Will

Abstract Jewish philosophers in the classical (premodern) period share the view that humans exert a significant measure of control over their actions and hence that they are appropriately praised and blamed, rewarded and punished for their observance and violation of the Divine Law. They reject the opposing view that human actions are foreordained by God, such that it is irrelevant what humans actually do or think. Does this mean that these philosophers affirm free will? If “free will” is understood as the ability of a psychological faculty (the will) to act autonomously, without motivating causes, then there is little if any discussion of human free will in classical Jewish sources, where the operative concept is “choice” (Arabic: ikhtiyār, Hebrew: beḥirah). The Hebrew phrase translated as “free choice” (beḥirah ḥofshit) does not appear before the end of the fifteenth century in Jewish thought (and meant something else), and the Hebrew phrase translated as “free will” (raẓon ḥofshi) appears only a handful of times before the nineteenth century. A voluntaristic conception of free will, a will that can act on its own without any motivating cause, emerges from thirteenth- and fourteenth-century debates in Latin philosophy that appear to have had little influence on Jewish philosophers.