A couple of weeks ago, I wrote about my friend Stephen Jay Gould, acknowledging his faults but also saying that I thought him a great force for moral good. The reason why I wrote was because, just ...

Determinism is not viable in practice but is an elegant theory that people may find appealing as an abstract article of faith. The main alternative to it is a probabilistic universe, in which multiple ...

Much contemporary scholarship on free will focuses on whether it is compatible with causal determinism. According to compatibilists, it is possible for an agent to be determined in all her choices and ...

(This article was coauthored with Kathleen D. Vohs and first published in Dialogue, the newsletter for the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, alongside a companion piece by John Bargh and ...

WE are, of course, discussing only the physical universe. Here strict determinism reigns, because even if there is no determinism in the behaviour of individual atoms, there are so many atoms in even ...