Pierre-Simon Laplace
1749-1827 · Scientific Revolution · Prominent
Laplace was a French mathematician and astronomer. Napoleon, the story goes, asked why God never appeared in his book on the heavens, and Laplace said he had no need of that hypothesis. Imagine instead a mind that knew where every particle sat and where it was headed: it could compute the whole past and the whole future. That is causal determinism at its clearest. Probability, for Laplace, measured how much we fail to know.
Signature
The position Laplace is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic
- Agency
- Hard Determinism
Positions on the 4 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- strongly leans Mechanistic (3 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Constructed (4 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Immanence (5 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (25 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
16 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Laplace refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Knowledge
- Sense Experience
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Agency
- Hard Determinism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom?