Determinism

According to determinism, whatever happens is necessitated by the conditions that come before it. At any time, only one outcome, in all its details, can happen given everything that has come before.

On the home page of this blog, I refer to metaphysical determinism. Why “metaphysical” and not “physical”? Because determinism allows that some events ‒ some things that happen ‒ may not be physical events. Determinism says that whatever happens, whether physical or nonphysical, is necessitated by the conditions that come before it.

We could say that whatever happens is caused by the conditions that come before it, as long as the causing allows only one outcome, in all its details. I prefer “necessitated by” because our talk of causation is governed sloppily by our practical interests, whereas necessitation is a strict metaphysical concept.