Abstract

In the Middle Ages, the concept of contingency was thought in connection with practice as a bridge between freedom and providence, indetermination, and necessity. In theology and ethics, natural contingency was seen as the necessary presupposition for free will, human responsibility, and salvation. In the Renaissance, the concept of contingency was transplanted from the ethical and theological fields to ontology and epistemology, in order to support natural and methodological reflection on the practical arts. Owing to advances in technology and the arts, the articulation of theory and practical experience was a theoretical challenge for practitioners with a theoretical predisposition as well as for learned scholars with a practical bias in disciplines as varied as mechanics and medicine. In this context, as I will argue, contingency permitted them to conceptualize the link between experience and theory. The theoretical reflection on practice, was even extended to literary theory, especially poetical composition, on the basis of theoretical conceptions crossing heterogeneous realms of human experience, practice and knowledge. In fact, it was assumed that nature and human activity are a continuum and the creative power of human ingenuity, and skillfulness is akin to forces operating in nature. In this essay, I will show that the Renaissance connection of practice and theory in the discourse on experience and its codification presupposed an ontology and an epistemology of contingency.