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Epictetus Free Will Essay

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Question number 3
In Epictetus The Handbook, Epictetus version of free will is when people are responsible for their own actions, and they can control what they do through self discipline. Epictetus believed that we should accept whatever happens and approach it calmly. Like he explained in the book “Do not seek to have events happen as you want them to, but instead want them to happen as they do happen, and your life will go well.” (Handbook of epictetus,pg 13) he’s basically stating that overall we have the power to view things either in a positive way or in a bad way. The internal world is our mind, which we have complete control over. We don’t have control over external things which are beyond our control. We can only influence external world, but not control it completely. We suffer because we don’t distinguish what is in our control and what is not in our control. …show more content…

The quote says “We can’t control how other people act or what they do, but we can control how we react or don’t react.” http://intentblog.com/we-cant-control-how-other-people-act-or-what-they-do-we-can-control-how-we-react/ This is an example of freewill. We can all relate to this quote because we have the freewill to either get mad and start an argument with someone, or stay calm and approach a situation maturely and calm. We have the freewill to control how we feel deep within. It is our responsibility to control how our inner state of mind thinks. No one else can control our internal world but you. That is the beauty of freewill. People tend to make external objects and situations as the most vulnerable things in life, but when the external world does not meet up to what we expected and had in mind they tend to get disappointed and grief. Epictetus said that what others do to us it is considered external, and we only have control over our response and how we let it affect

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