ABSTRACT
Fatalism is not the only threat to free action. Since the rise of modern science, many philosophers have held that the world is deterministic and that determinism threatens free will. Thomas Hobbes attempted to show how politics could be a science. His account of the nature of matter was the foundation for his theory of human psychology, which in turn provided the foundation for his theory of politics. Determinism can be understood as the thesis that, given the laws of nature, and the state of the universe at any time arbitrary time t, it is impossible for the history of the universe to be other than it actually is. Those who believe in free will are either compatibilists or libertarians. But assessment of these two theories is complicated by the fact that compatibilists and libertarians presuppose quite different definitions of what it is to act freely.
