Quotes About Determinism

Criminality being partially preordained may seem to let culprits off the hook. Yet it also makes the proclivity seem ineradicable and suggests that reform is unlikely: once a baddie, always a baddie.

Instead of trying to find out what goes on inside a person's head ("mentalism"), to know why people act as they do, Skinner suggested, all we need to know is what circumstances caused them to act in a certain way. Our

Communists and capitalists alike, liberal and conservative capitalists alike, have needed to replace religion with some form of determinism, so that they can say to their victims, I am doing this because I can't do otherwise. It is not my fault. It is inevitable. The wonder is how often organized religion has gone along with this lie.

Spinoza compares the feeling of free will to a stone's thinking, as it travels through space, that it determines its own trajectory and selects the place and time of its fall.

IV. IS MAN A MACHINE? Yes, said Julien Offroy de La Mettrie.

Uncertainty and Complementarity It is wrong to think that the task of physics is to find out how Nature is. Physics concerns what we can say about Nature. —NIELS BOHR DETERMINISM—THE

Therefore, all these causes-billions of causes-coincided so as to bring about what happened. And consequently none of them was the exclusive cause of the event, but the event had to take place simply because it had to take place.

But just as the force of gravitation-in itself incomprehensible, though felt by every man- is only so far understood by us as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject, so too the force of free will, unthinkable in itself, but recognized by the consciousness of every man, is only so far understood as we know the laws of necessity to which it is subject.

Newton's equations of absolute exactitude and certainty ("classical determinism") were replaced by Schrodinger's new equations and Heisenberg's mathematics of fuzziness, indeterminacy, and probability.

Like many philosophers, I reject the idea that free acts must be uncaused; freedom is not only consistent with but demands determinism. Were actions not caused by antecedent factors, including preferences, an agent himself would not know what he was about to do and could be surprised by his freedom. Free choice might go against the agent's own stable values, a nightmare caricature of autonomy.

I think the materialist conception of history is valid.

For anyone inclined to caricature environmental history as 'environmental determinism,' the contrasting histories of the Dominican Republic and Haiti provide a useful antidote. Yes, environmental problems do constrain human societies, but the societies' responses also make a difference.

Those who hide their complete freedom from themselves out of a spirit of seriousness or by means of deterministic excuses, I shall call cowards; those who try to show that their existence was necessary, when it is the very contingency of man's appearance on earth, I shall call stinkers. But cowards or stinkers can be judged only from a strictly unbiased point of view.

If existence really does precede essence, there is no explaining things away by reference to a fixed and given human nature. In other words, there is no determinism, man is free, man is freedom. On the other hand, if God does not exist, we find no values or commands to turn to which legitimize our conduct. So, in the bright realm of values, we have no excuse behind us, nor justification before us. We are alone, with no excuses.

The idea of determinism combined with complete human responsibility struck me as very hard to reconcile with an idea of justice, let alone mercy.

Everything's explained by the constant intervention of Allah. And whatever happens had to happen, and was decreed at the beginning of time, and there's no way of even imagining how anything could have been different from what it is.

A partir de estas definiciones, Spinoza procede por medio de pruebas euclidianas a construir un sistema determinista e irrefutable que abarca todo el universo.

In one sense I feel that my book is a one-woman argument against determinism.

Abandoned by philosophy, politics, and sociology, historical determinism continues to hold out in formalist art criticism.

La explicación histórica que hemos presentado hasta ahora indica que cualquier enfoque basado en el determinismo histórico (basado en geografía, cultura o incluso en otros factores históricos) es inadecuado. Las pequeñas diferencias y la casualidad no forman parte solamente

The historical account we have presented so far indicates that any approach based on historical determinism—based on geography, culture, or even other historical factors—is inadequate. Small differences and contingency are not just part of our theory; they are part of the shape of history.

Like the doctrine of determinism, its better-known metaphysical cousin, fatalism holds that it is not in our power to do anything other than what we actually end up doing.

A world in which the choices we make do not finally matter, because our wills are already fixed beneath the weight of a crushing determinism, is not a human world.

My conclusion on Freewill and predestination- they are identical.