As I understand it, there was no debate on free will before about three centuries ago.
This is quite incorrect. Determinism (as opposed to the default folk psychology of free will) has been long debated; from Wikipedia:
“Some of the main philosophers who have dealt with this issue are Marcus Aurelius, Omar Khayyám, Thomas Hobbes, Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, David Hume, Baron d’Holbach (Paul Heinrich Dietrich), Pierre-Simon Laplace, Arthur Schopenhauer, William James, Friedrich Nietzsche, Albert Einstein, Niels Bohr, and, more recently, Victoria DiMarco, John Searle, Suraj Manjunath, Jai Ramachandran, Ted Honderich, and Daniel Dennett.”
This is a very incomplete list, which omits people like the Stoics such as Chrysippus; the other article mentions later the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.
In Eastern tradition, there are many different takes on ‘karma’.
The atheist Carvaka held a deterministic scientific view of the universe, and a materialist view of the mind (although so little survives it’s hard to be sure). I’m not entirely clear on the Samkhya darsana’s position on causality, though their views on satkaryavada (as opposed to the common Indian position of asatkaryavada) sound determinist.
And of course, who can really generalize about all Buddhist schools’ positions? I have no doubt whatsoever that many Buddhist philosophies could be fairly described as completely determinist.
This is quite incorrect. Determinism (as opposed to the default folk psychology of free will) has been long debated; from Wikipedia:
This is a very incomplete list, which omits people like the Stoics such as Chrysippus; the other article mentions later the Atomists Leucippus and Democritus.
In Eastern tradition, there are many different takes on ‘karma’.
The atheist Carvaka held a deterministic scientific view of the universe, and a materialist view of the mind (although so little survives it’s hard to be sure). I’m not entirely clear on the Samkhya darsana’s position on causality, though their views on satkaryavada (as opposed to the common Indian position of asatkaryavada) sound determinist.
And of course, who can really generalize about all Buddhist schools’ positions? I have no doubt whatsoever that many Buddhist philosophies could be fairly described as completely determinist.