Title: Determinism - By Branch / Doctrine - The Basics of Philosophy
Headings: 
Determinism
Content: or even that neither Determinism nor Free Will is true (known as Pessimistic Incompatibilism ). Compatibilism is the belief that Free Will and Determinism can be compatible ideas, and that it is possible to believe both without being logically inconsistent. By this definition, Free Will is not the ability to choose as an agent independent of prior cause, but as an agent who is not forced to make a certain choice. This leads to the position of Soft Determinism, proposed by the American Pragmatist William James on the grounds that thorough-going, or Hard, Determinism leads either to a bleak pessimism or to a degenerate subjectivism in moral judgment
History of Determinism
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In Buddhism, there is a theory called Dependent Origination (or Dependent Arising ), which is similar to the Western concept of Determinism. Roughly speaking, it states that phenomena arise together in a mutually interdependent web of cause and effect, and that every phenomenon is conditioned by, and depends on, every other phenomena. According to the ancient Chinese "Yi Jing" (or "I Ching", the "Book of Changes" ), a kind of divine will sets the fundamental rules for the working out of the probabilities on which the universe operates, although human wills are also a factor in the ways in which we can deal with the real world situations we encounter. In the West, the Ancient Greek atomists Leucippus and Democritus were the first to anticipate Determinism when they theorized that all processes in the world were due to the mechanical interplay of atoms. With the advent of Newtonian physics, in the 17th Century, which depicts the physical matter of the universe as operating according to a set of fixed, knowable laws, it began to appear that, once the initial conditions of the universe have been established, then the rest of the history of the universe follows inevitably, (rather like billiard balls moving and striking each other in predictable ways to produce predictable results ). Any uncertainty was always a term that applied to the accuracy of human knowledge about causes and effects, and not to the causes and effects themselves. Since the beginning of the 20th Century, quantum mechanics has revealed previously concealed aspects of events, and Newtonian physics has been shown to be merely an approximation to the reality of quantum mechanics.