Free will in antiquity
In Plato's Gorgias (and in the Protagoras 345c4-e6), Socrates argues that no one does wrong willingly, one of the most famous doctrines to be associated with him. When framed in modern (Western) terms, the implication is that it is ignorance, rather that free individual agency, that is responsible for morally wrong actions.
Hard determinism
In ancient Greece, Socrates initiated the rationalistic teaching that any agent is obliged to pursue the chief good conceived by his or her mind. The peripatetic naturalist Strato of Lampsacus speculated that an unconscious divine power acts in the world and causes the origin, growth and breakdown of things. Diodorus Cronus asserted the identity of the possible and the necessary and inferred that future events are as determined as the past ones. Chrysippus refuted the "idle argument" invented to discredit determinism as if human efforts were futile in a preordained world; he explained that fated events occur with the engagement of conscious agents. In the 17th century, both Locke and Spinoza argued for strict causality of volitional acts. In the age of enlightenment, Baron d’Holbach promulgated the naturalistic interpretation of mental events. Schopenhauer observed that everyone regards himself free "a priori"; however, "a posteriori" he must discover that he had been obliged to make the decisions he actually made. Nietzsche noticed that free decisions are graded as "causa sui", emerging from non-existence. Recently Daniel Wegner stressed the limitations of free will on grounds of experimental evidence for unconscious choice and action. To prove determinism, the following putative experiment was proposed: all principal differences between the features of an artificial zygote and that developing naturally can be avoided.