ABSTRACT
One group of pre-Socratic philosophers, however, not only formed the idea of an all-governing physical law, they hypothesized the existence of invisible atomic particles as the mechanism of that law, and nearly developed the implications of scientific determinism. Since the Stoics were enormously concerned with ethics and social philosophy, the problem of reconciling determinism and human responsibility was of considerable importance to them. Epicurus was primarily concerned with ethics, and dealt with physics only in so far as it had implications for ethics. On the whole, Plato's "moral determinism" is not very important in the history of determinism but belongs to the field of ethics. The root of Aristotle's claim that determinate truth values for future contingent propositions leads to determinism is, Williams says, an argument so swaggeringly invalid that the student can hardly believe he meant it. One of the most famous examples for analysis in the history of philosophy is Aristotle's "sea-fight tomorrow".
