Lesson 2.3: Laplace's Demon

If every event has a cause, then perhaps your next thought was written into the universe long before you were born.

Topics Discussed

* The American, French, and Latin American Revolutions as products of the Enlightenment

* Moderate vs. Radical Enlightenment thinkers

* Three explanations for historical change

* How the rise of the social sciences transformed explanations of human behavior

* Laplace's Demon and the idea of causal determinism

* The distinction between causal determinism and hard determinism

* Earlier forms of determinism

* The emergence of social physics

* Historical and philosophical objections to hard determinism

* Scientific challenges from non-Euclidean geometry and quantum mechanics