Quentin Serot

This article offers a reinterpretation of the history of determinism based on Gaston Bachelard’s historical epistemology. Three regimes can be distinguished : the universal determinism of classical physics, based on the unity of time, causality, and substances ; the mathematical determinism of relativity, which pluralizes perspectives by inscribing causality into the formal structure of space-time ; and the technical determinism of quantum mechanics, where probability and phenomenotechnics become the operators of a new rationality. Bachelard’s analysis thus makes it possible to move beyond the alternative between determinism and indeterminism : quantum mechanics does not refute determinism but redefines its meaning, linking it to the technical production of phenomena and to a discontinuous ontology of events. By tracing this transition from Laplace’s demon to Schrödinger’s cat, the article highlights the role of epistemological breaks in the constitution of the “New Scientific Spirit,” where the notion of determinism is reinvented in line with the conceptual and experimental transformations of modern physics.