Determinism — From Latin determinare (to delimit). The metaphysical thesis that every event, including human actions, is necessarily caused by antecedent events in accordance with natural laws, so that the present state of the universe fixes a single possible future. The idea has roots in the Stoic notion of heimarmenē (fate as a chain of causes), developed above all by Chrysippus, and receives its classical formulation in Laplace: an intelligence knowing all the forces of nature and the position of all bodies could predict the future entirely and reconstruct the past. Determinism should be distinguished from fatalism, on which certain outcomes would occur regardless of intermediate causes; the determinist, by contrast, holds that what we do is part of the causal chain and that everything could have been otherwise had prior conditions been otherwise. The central problem is compatibility with freedom and moral responsibility. Three positions are distinguished: (1) hard determinism — freedom is illusory (d’Holbach; Spinoza on one reading); (2) compatibilism — determinism and freedom coexist, since being free means acting according to one’s own desires without external coercion (Hume, Mill, Frankfurt); (3) metaphysical libertarianism — genuinely free acts exist that break the causal chain (Kant, with freedom as a postulate of practical reason). A recurring example is the person who commits a crime under neurological compulsion: if each choice follows necessarily from prior causes, does it still make sense to blame them? Quantum mechanics (20th c.) introduces indeterminism at the subatomic level, but its relevance to human freedom remains controversial.
← Glossary