# Lesson 2.3: Laplace's Demon

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409/lesson-2-3-laplace-s-demon
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409/lesson-2-3-laplace-s-demon.md
Podcast: [The Luxury of Virtue](https://stenobird.com/podcast/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409)
Published: 2026-07-09T01:06:40+00:00
Episode link: https://zencastr.com/z/0MAPup4C
Audio file: https://redirect.zencastr.com/r/episode/6a4ef42091e21de995cf0853/size/1812024078/video-files/64df8cc3b9f97166287697c5/284aae6b-a951-41f6-8796-26b0ca7b14f8.mp4
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/the-luxury-of-virtue-7020409/episodes/lesson-2-3-laplace-s-demon
Duration seconds: 5113

## Resource

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

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## Transcript

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