determinism (redirected from Determinism in history)

determinism, philosophical thesis that every event is the inevitable result of antecedent causes. Applied to ethics and psychology, determinism usually involves a denial of free will, although many philosophers have attempted to reconcile the two concepts. Thomas Hobbes, identifying the will with appetites and defining freedom as the absence of impediments, concluded that free will exists where nothing prevents a person from satisfying his prevailing appetite. David Hume argued that a person's willful conduct counts as freely chosen even though his will has itself been determined by his motives. William James called such attempts to fit notions of free will into determinist systems "soft" determinism; "hard" determinism excludes the possibility of free will altogether. The doctrine of determinism is opposed by the principle of emergence, which states that truly novel and unpredictable events may occur out of the composite forces of nature.

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determinism

In philosophy, the doctrine that all events, including human decisions, are completely determined by previously existing causes. The traditional free will problem arises from the question, Is moral responsibility consistent with the truth of determinism? Among those who believe it is not consistent, some, maintaining the truth of determinism, have concluded that no one is morally responsible for what he does (and therefore that punishment for criminal actions is unjustified); others, maintaining the reality of moral responsibility, have concluded that determinism is false. Those who believe that moral responsibility is consistent with determinism are known as compatibilists (see compatibilism). Pierre-Simon Laplace is responsible for the classical formulation of determinism in the 18th century. For Laplace, the present state of the universe is the effect of its previous state and the cause of the state that follows it. If a mind, at any given moment, could know all the laws and all the forces operating in nature and the respective positions and momenta of all its components, it could thereby know with certainty the future and the past of every entity.