What Does Epictetus Mean By “Prohairesis”

A key idea of Stoic philosophy, worked out in detail by Epictetus.

For several years now, I’ve been doing quite a bit of research work — piecing together a lot of passages from a wide array of texts, and reconstructing theoretical and practical perspectives, dealing with a term that plays a major role in ancient moral theory. In the Greek, it is prohairesis. It gets translated in many different ways, ranging from “choice” (with a number of qualifiers, such as “moral” or “deliberate”) to “commitment”, to “faculty of choice” to “moral purpose”, and even. . . (this is why I got interested in it) “will”.

Last Fall, I gave an invited talk as part of the Midwest Seminar in Ancient and Medieval Philosophy, “Prohairesis in Epictetus’ Stoic Moral Theory” (you can watch the video of it, if you like, here — and the slides are available here). I was honored to get to present my research and reflections, and delighted with the questions and discussion it provoked. But, why is prohairesis an important topic?

What Does Prohairesis Mean?

Lexically, prohairesis is a noun derived from the verb haireein, which has a core meaning of taking or grabbing, and derivatively, selecting — particularly when coupled with the prefix pro-. So in its original sense…