Episode
Lesson 2.3: Laplace's Demon
- Podcast
- The Luxury of Virtue
- Published
- Jul 9, 2026
- Duration seconds
- 5113
- Processing state
not_requested- Canonical source
- https://zencastr.com/z/0MAPup4C
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Summary
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