La délibération chez Alexandre d’Aphrodise et le problème du déterminisme per Délibération et pratiques politiques La réflexion aristotélicienne, ses antécédents et sa postérité

Abstract This paper examines Alexander of Aphrodisias’ doctrine of τὸ ἐφ’ ἡμῖν (“what depends on us”) within the broader debate on determinism in late antiquity. By contextualizing De fato and the related Mantissa treatises, it shows how Alexander reformulates Aristotle’s ethics of deliberation into a metaphysical and civic theory of human responsibility. Against the Stoic and astrological determinism of his time, Alexander defines freedom in Aristotle’s footsteps, i.e. by subtraction, delimiting the domain of human action within the natural order. His view preserves both causal necessity and real contingency, grounding moral accountability in the metaphysics of the possible. Freedom, like possibility, is thus a structural feature of being, essential to the polis as to the sublunary part of the cosmos. There are strong cultural and historical reasons to regard Alexander, the leading figure of the early third-century Peripatos, as the thinker who most explicitly endowed the notion of free will with an ontological grounding, by articulating nature, deliberation, and responsibility within a reconstructed Aristotelian framework responsive to the intellectual demands of his time. In this sense, the coherence between deliberation and responsibility emerges not as a contingent concern of late antiquity, but as an enduring requirement of practical philosophy.