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
• Why indeterminism does not automatically establish free will