"What is Determinism?"
Wednesday 27 January 2016
19:00 to 20:30
A Talk by Bernard Hurley - Most discussions of determinism focus on what reasons we may have for either accepting or rejecting it. However in this talk I will not be arguing either for or against determinism, but rather discussing what sort of a claim it is.
There is more than one claim that could plausibly be called determinism and an argument for one type of determinism is not necessarily an argument for another type.
As a starting point I will take Laplace's famous statement:
"We ought then to regard the present state of the universe as the effect of its anterior state and as the cause of the one which is to follow. Given for one instant an intelligence which could comprehend all the forces by which nature is animated and the respective situation of the beings who compose it - an intelligence sufficiently vast to submit these data to analysis - it would embrace in the same formula the movements of the greatest bodies of the universe and those of the lightest atom; for it, nothing would be uncertain and the future, as the past, would be present to its eyes."
(Pierre Simon, Marquis de Laplace: "A Philosophical Essay on Probabilities" translated by Truscott and Emory p.4. Free download:
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The Druid's Head |
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