This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Necessity and Contingency as Degrees of Stability Necessity (Contingency) and Description Cleopatra's Nose and Other Category Mistakes Making a Difference Emplotment Prophets of Contingency References.

_ Source: _Volume 10, Issue 1, pp 51 - 75 History occupies a somewhat awkward position in the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Although they often criticise history as a practice and advance alternatives that are explicitly anti-historical, such as ‘nomadology’ and ‘geophilosophy’, their scholarship is nevertheless littered with historical encounters and deeply influenced by historians such as Fernand Braudel. One of Deleuze and Guattari’s more significant engagements with history occurs through their reading and theory of universal history. (...) In this paper I will explicate and critically analyse the nature of this universal history vis-à-vis its most pertinent counterpoint: Hegel’s philosophy of world history. In contrast to Hegel’s form of historicism, which universalizes by virtue of a unitary and totalizing force, Deleuze and Guattari develop a universalizing mechanism that is strictly devoid of any privileged essence. Following, Deleuze and Guattari’s form of universal history is marked above all by contingency as opposed to necessity. In this paper I will show precisely how. I will also go on to demonstrate how Deleuze and Guattari’s universal history offers the promise of an historical ontology commensurate with the processes of creativity and becoming, provided that appropriate steps are taken to reaffirm the radical contingency at its heart. (shrink)

In this essay I propose to examine Hegel’s account of necessity and contingency in the Science of Logic. Anyone who dares to take Hegel’s Logic seriously in public risks being accused by legions of formal logicians of “elementary logical fallacies”. Nevertheless, John Burbidge, Dieter Henrich, and others have demonstrated that it is possible to discuss the Logic with clarity and intelligibility, and I shall endeavor to emulate their example as best as I can. One should take heed, however; (...) even Hegel admits that “the concept of necessity is very difficult,” and rendering the concept of necessity intelligible will not eliminate that difficulty. All I can hope to do, therefore, is take us from the point at which we are not even sure what the difficulty is supposed to be to the point at which the nature of the difficulty itself becomes clear. (shrink)

The paper considers the question of when the operator L of necessity in modal logic can be expressed in terms of the operator meaning it is non-contingent that.

In this essay, I argue for a revival of Adorno and Horkheimer’s critical philosophy of history on account of the fact that their construction articulates both the necessity of various aspects of our current socio-political conditions given the past tendencies of rationality and domination, and the contingency of the present miseries by problematizing the continuous historical narratives that justify a certain version of the present. After demonstrating that the accomplishment of critical philosophy of history has to be located (...) in the dialectic of the necessary as well as the contingent elements of historical developments, I turn to the Dialectic of Enlightenment as a particular constellation that exemplifies this accomplishment. I show that in this book we find a critical philosophy of history that narrates a story that both makes fascism the necessary corollary and conclusion of instrumental rationality and shows its contingent entanglement with domination. In this way, the initial question of how reason and rationality can lead to domination is now transformed into one that asks how we can we reinterpret and re-animate them such that they are no longer complicit with domination. (shrink)

In his book Welt und Unendlichkeit, László Tengelyi has enquired into the possibility of a phenomenological metaphysics. Among the many issues addressed in his book, he thematized a real necessity of a non-apriori kind at Aristotle and Husserl, a necessity which he called „a necessity of the fact“. His research settled the basis for the present enquiry, which will examine the relationship between the absolute and the conditional necessity of a fact as well as the contingent (...) or accidental features involved therein at Aristotle and Husserl, insofar as facticity is concerned. I intend to show that although both authors share the view that worldly beings are characterized by their contingency, they differ as to their necessity: Aristotle attributes a contingent necessity to the factual being i.e. to reality, a necessity characterized by its being temporarily conditioned by actuality and which can therefore be defined as the ,conditional necessity of a fact‘. As to Husserl, transcendental phenomenology must, upon the basis of the eidetic method, determine the possibilities out of which the ego constitutes the factual world. He states the necessity of the fact as an eidetic necessity, which has to be grounded on eidetic laws. Later on, enquiries into a „metaphysics in new sense“ lead to a revision of the meaning of „fact“ and to an inversion of the order of foundation as well: the original givenness of the world, the primal I, intersubjectivity and historicity as primal and absolute facts carry the eidetic necessities. Accidental causes, on the other hand, account not only for the contingency of the real but, at Husserl, for the ego‘s ,essential openness‘ and its core of primal contingency. In this context, I shall argue that facticity paired with the accidental allows for the irruption of something new that overwhelms us – an event as Ereignis. (shrink)

Through both an historical and philosophical analysis of the concept of possibility, we show how including both potentiality and actuality as part of the real is both compatible with experience and contributes to solving key problems of fundamental process and emergence. The book is organized into four main sections that incorporate our routes to potentiality: (1) potentiality in modern science [history and philosophy; quantum physics and complexity]; (2) Relational Realism [ontological interpretation of quantum physics; philosophy and logic]; (3) Process Physics (...) [ontological interpretation of relativity theory; physics and philosophy]; (4) on speculative philosophy and physics [limitations and approximations; process philosophy]. We conclude that certain fundamental problems in modern physics require complementary analyses of certain philosophical and metaphysical issues, and that such scholarship reveals intrinsic features and limits of determinism, potentiality and emergence that enable, among others, important progress on the quantum theory of measurement problem and new understandings of emergence. (shrink)

The Master Argument, recorded by Epictetus, indicates that Diodorus had deduced a contradiction from the conjoint assertion of three propositions. The Argument, which has to do with necessity and contingency and therefore with freedom, has attracted the attention of logicians above all. There have been many attempts at reconstructing it in logical terms, without excessive worry about historical plausibility and with the foregone conclusion that it was sophistic since it directly imperilled our common sense notion of freedom. This (...) text takes exception to recent tradition, translating the propositions into logical terms. The propositions figuring in The Master Argument are interpreted in terms of temporal modal logic where both the modalities and the statements they govern have chronological indices. This means that the force of the argument comes not from purely logical or modal considerations, but from our experience of time. (shrink)

The paper introduces a contingential language extended with a propositional constant τ axiomatized in a system named KΔτ , which receives a semantical analysis via relational models. A definition of the necessity operator in terms of Δ and τ allows proving (i) that KΔτ is equivalent to a modal system named K□τ (ii) that both KΔτ and K□τ are tableau-decidable and complete with respect to the defined relational semantics (iii) that the modal τ -free fragment of KΔτ is exactly (...) the deontic system KD. In §4 it is proved that the modal τ -free fragment of a system KΔτw weaker than KΔτ is exactly the minimal normal system K. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that Kierkegaard's theory of change is motivated by a robust notion of contingency. His view of contingency is sharply juxtaposed with a strong notion of absolute necessity. I show that how he understands these notions explains certain of his claims about causation. I end by suggesting a compatibilist interpretation of Kierkegaard's philosophy.

SummaryI defend a conventionalist view of logical and mathematical truths against the criticisms of Quine and Stroud. Conventionalism is best formulated by appealing to sense‐conferring rules governing important logical and mathematical expressions. Conventional necessity can be understood as arising from these rules in a way that is immune to Quine's and Stroud's criticisms of the earlier formulation of conventionalism, in which stress was incorrectly laid on axiomatic systems of logic.RésuméJe soutiens, en dépit des critiques de Quine et de Stroud, (...) une conception conventionnaliste des vérités logiques et de vérités mathématiques. La meilleure façon de formuler le conventionnalisme est de faire appel à des règies conférant un sens à?on;importantes expressions logiques et mathématiques. La nécessité conventionnelle peut être comprise comme provenant de ces règies par des voies qui ne donnent pas prise aux critiques de Quine et de Stroud ag ľégard de ľancienne formulation du conventionnalisme, dans laquelle ľaccent était mis, a tort, sur les systèmes axiomatiques de la logique.ZusammenfassungGegen Quines und Strouds Kritiken verteidige ich eine konventionalistische Auffassung der logischen und mathematischer Wahrheiten. Der Konventionalismus wird am besten durch Berufung auf bedeutungsstiftende Regeln, die den Gebrauch wichtiger logischer und mathematischer Ausdrücke bestimmen, formuliert. Konventionelle Notwendigkeit kann als von diesen Regeln hervorgebracht verstanden werden – und das zwar auf eine Art, die sie vor Quines und Strouds Anfechtungen schützen. In der von diesen kritisierten, früheren Fassung wurde zu unrecht das Gewicht auf axiomatische Systeme der Logik gelegt. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that there are two distinct senses of contingency operative within Hegel’s philosophy, and that the failure to sufficiently distinguish between them can lead to a misrepresentation of Hegel’s idealism. The first sense of contingency is the categorical one explicated in the Science of Logic, in which contingency carries the meaning of dependence and conditionality, while the second sense of contingency, predominantly found within the Philosophy of Nature, means irrationality and chance. Not (...) only does Hegel acknowledge a systematic place for the necessity of contingency within his ontological logic, but he also admits the existence of real chance and multiplicity in nature. However, I claim that these two acknowledgements should not be collapsed since they involve different senses of contingency. (shrink)

John Duns Scotus distinguished the ‘convertible’ transcendentals, from ‘disjunctive’ transcendental pairs The latter are mutually exclusive pairs that together cover all of being. This paper investigates the distinctive modal metaphysical account based on the necessary-contingent pair of disjunctive transcendentals, developed by Scotus in approaching the problem of divine foreknowledge and future contingents. Although Scotus commented several times on this problem, only in his Reportatio did he explicitly add a succinct exposition distinguishing between two kinds of contingency and two kinds (...) of necessity. This double understanding of the necessary-contingent pair is first of all systematically and schematically presented in the paper. Subsequently, instead of continuing with the problem of divine foreknowledge as such, the implications of this Scotist framework for an adequate metaphysical understanding of the human will and its freedom will be drawn out. Finally, these schemes are compared to recent literature on the central role of contingency in Scotus’s thought, especially to the research of A. Vos on synchronic contingency and J. Söder on operative contingency. (shrink)

Post-Marxism emerged in the 1970s and 80s as a way to retain certain insights from Marxism while disposing of its indefensible and destructive elements, especially the tendency to reduce all social change to the economic base. This book offers a new and critical reading of post-Marxism, arguing that whilst it convincinly deconstructs the prevalent economism in Marxism as the necessary logic of social reproduction, it nonetheless still retains an ontology of a closed capitalist economy, inhabited by a set of necessary (...) logics. Through a careful symptomatic reading of the works of influential post-Marxian thinkers, Ernesto Laclau and Étienne Balibar, the book argues that while post-Marxian positions have constructed a theory of social contingency, it has failed in different ways to dislodge the constitution of class and capitalist reproduction from essentialist narratives. (shrink)

This thesis argues that the concept of contingency plays a central role in Althusser's recasting of Marxist philosophy and in his attempt to free the Marxist conception of history from concepts such as teleology, necessity and origin. It is critically placed both against those readings that see the emergence of the problematic of contingency only in the late Althusserm and to the most recent attempts to establish a straightforward continuity in Althusser's work. Drawing on published and unplublished (...) material and covering the entirety of Althusser's philosophical itinerary, the thesis seeks both to unearth the latent presence of this problematic, and its various implications, at each stage in the development of his work. It seeks to clarify, in a systematic way, the conceptual consequences of Althusser's commitment to contingency to the received understanding of his conceptions of structural change, ideology and political action. In particular, it argues that the standpoint of contingency allows us to locate in Althusser's 'Structural Marxism' the emergence of a 'logic of irruption' and structurally under-determined development of becoming. By emphasising this logic of contingency, it then seeks to produce a more nuanced assessment of his theory of ideology through the introduction of the concept of 'overinterpellation'. It finally attempts to distinguish two moments in the emergence of a materialism of contingency, first political and then philosophical; the problematic coexistence of these two aspects helps to account for the unstable charactoer of Althusser's late philosophical project. (shrink)

This book is an English version of a book published in 1984 in French, the aim of which was to give a reconstruction of Diodorus Cronus's Master Argument, together with a historical analysis of some of the central modal notions on which it draws. In preparing the English text, Vuillemin has made some changes to the logic of his reconstruction of Diodorus's Argument and added an epilogue. The Master Argument consisted of three premises: Every past truth is necessary, The impossible (...) does not follow from the possible, and Something is possible which neither is nor will be true. Diodorus claimed that these premises are inconsistent, and purported to derive the negation of the third premise, which is plausibly to be identified with the principle of plenitude, from the first two premises. (shrink)

The traditional view that all logical truths are metaphysically necessary has come under attack in recent years. The contrary claim is prominent in David Kaplan’s work on demonstratives, and Edward Zalta has argued that logical truths that are not necessary appear in modal languages supplemented only with some device for making reference to the actual world (and thus independently of whether demonstratives like ‘I’, ‘here’, and ‘now’ are present). If this latter claim can be sustained, it strikes close to the (...) heart of the traditional view. I begin this paper by discussing and refuting Zalta’s argument in the context of a language for propositional modal logic with an actuality connective (section 1). This involves showing that his argument in favor of real world validity his preferred explication of logical truth, is fallacious. Next (section 2) I argue for an alternative explication of logical truth called general validity. Since the rule of necessitation preserves general validity, the argument of section 2 provides a reason for affirming the traditional view. Finally (section 3) I show that the intuitive idea behind the discredited notion of real world validity finds legitimate expression in an object language connective for deep necessity. (shrink)

I argue that Kant acknowledges two models of spontaneous self-determination that rational beings are capable of. The first model involves absolute unconditional necessity and excludes any form of contingency. The second model involves (albeit not as a matter of definition) a form of contingency which entails alternative possibilities for determining oneself. The first model would be exhibited by a divine being; the second model is exhibited by human beings. Human beings do, however, partake in the divine model (...) up to an extent, namely, as far as the legislative spontaneity of their law-giving faculties are concerned. I conclude by suggesting that for Kant, the mechanistic principle that we are exclusively determined by natural causes poses a twofold threat for human agency. In one respect (in relation to the second model), it threatens us with the obliteration of contingency, or with the universality of hypothetical necessity. But in another respect (in relation to the first model), it threatens us (and our putative "laws") with the obliteration of absolute necessity, or with the universality of contingency. (shrink)

Saul Kripke, in a series of classic writings of the 1960s and 1970s, changed the face of metaphysics and philosophy of language. Christopher Hughes offers a careful exposition and critical analysis of Kripke's central ideas about names, necessity, and identity. He clears up some common misunderstandings of Kripke's views on rigid designation, causality and reference, and the necessary a posteriori and contingent a priori. Through his engagement with Kripke's ideas Hughes makes a significant contribution to ongoing debates on, inter (...) alia, the semantics of natural kind terms, the nature of natural kinds, the essentiality of origin and constitution, the relative merits of 'identitarian' and counterpart-theoretic accounts of modality, and the identity or otherwise of mental types and tokens with physical types and tokens. No specialist knowledge in either the philosophy of language or metaphysics is presupposed; Hughes's book will be valuable for anyone working on the ideas which Kripke made famous in the philosophy world. (shrink)

Biological taxonomists rely on the so-called ‘type method’ to regulate taxonomic nomenclature. For each newfound taxon, they lay down a ‘type specimen’ that carries with it the name of the taxon it belongs to. Even if a taxon’s circumscription is unknown and/or subject to change, it remains a necessary truth that the taxon’s type specimen falls within its boundaries. Philosophers have noted some time ago that this naming practice is in line with the causal theory of reference and its central (...) notion of rigid designation: a type specimen fixes the reference of a taxon name without defining it. Recently, however, this consensus has come under pressure in the pages of this journal. In a series of articles by Alex Levine, Joseph LaPorte, and Matthew Haber, it has been argued that type specimens belong only contingently to their species, and that this may bode problems for the relation between type method and causal theory. I will argue that this ‘contingency debate’ is a debate gone wrong, and that none of the arguments in defense of contingency withstand scrutiny. Taxonomic naming is not out of step with the causal theory, but conforms to it. However, I will also argue that this observation is itself in need of further explanation, since application of the type method in taxonomic practice is plagued by errors and ambiguities that threaten it with breaking down. Thus, the real question becomes why taxonomic naming conforms to the causal theory in the first place. I will show that the answer lies in the embedding of the type method into elaborate codes of nomenclature. (shrink)

It is common to think that grounding is necessary in the sense that: if P grounds Q, then necessarily: if P, then Q. Though most accept this principle, some give counterexamples to it. Instead of straightforwardly arguing for, or against, necessity, I explain the sense in which grounding is necessary and contingent. I argue that there are two kinds of grounding: what-grounding and why-grounding, where the former kind is necessary while the latter is contingent.

I argue that Kant acknowledges two models of spontaneous self-determination that rational beings are capable of. The first model involves absolute unconditional necessity and excludes any form of contingency. The second model involves (albeit not as a matter of definition) a form of contingency which entails alternative possibilities for determining oneself. The first model would be exhibited by a divine being; the second model is exhibited by human beings. Human beings do, however, partake in the divine model (...) up to an extent, namely, as far as the legislative spontaneity of their law-giving faculties are concerned. I conclude by suggesting that for Kant, the mechanistic principle that we are exclusively determined by natural causes poses a twofold threat for human agency. In one respect (in relation to the second model), it threatens us with the obliteration of contingency, or with the universality of hypothetical necessity. But in another respect (in relation to the first model), it threatens us (and our putative "laws") with the obliteration of absolute necessity, or with the universality of contingency. (shrink)

In this article, I present a novel account of a priori warrant, which I then use to examine the relationship between a priori and a posteriori warrant in mathematics. According to this account of a priori warrant, the reason that a posteriori warrant is subordinate to a priori warrant in mathematics is because processes that produce a priori warrant are reliable independent of the contexts in which they are used, whereas this is not true for processes that produce a posteriori (...) warrant. Following this, I show how this difference explains why a priori warranting processes, such as proof (and mathematical intuition) can, and a posteriori warranting processes cannot, definitively establish mathematical results. I then show why, in the event of a conflict between a priori and a posteriori warranting processes, the former undermine, and cannot be undermined by, the latter. Finally, I explain the connection between apriority and mathematical necessity, but do so in a way that allows for the existence of contingent a priori knowledge. (shrink)

character. So, we have learned from early on that laws are meant to portray a sort of necessity in nature. The comings and goings described by law are not merely contingently related. Rather, it is part of the concept of law that these events are connected in some significant way: "nomically" connected. One important desideratum for an account of law, then, is that it respect and perhaps explain this modal character.

This article aims to show that the so-called ‘Ockhamist’ solution to the determinist challenge was a commonplace among Parisian scholastics around 1200. On the ‘Ockhamist’ view, some propositions about the past do not fall under the necessity of the past, since their truth-value depends on the future. The paper focuses on two puzzles involving Abraham’s belief in the future Incarnation. The author discusses the ‘Ockhamist’ strategies adopted by theologians of the period, including Simon of Tournai, Peter of Poitiers, Praepositinus (...) of Cremona, Stephen Langton, Geoffrey of Poitiers, and William of Auxerre. Langton draws an analogy between Abraham’s faith and Christ’s statement “Thou shalt deny me thrice” and suggests that past movements of faith are counterfactually flexible with regard to content. In order to interpret Langton’s statements, the author sketches a model of empty slots in the supernatural layer of the past, retrospectively infused with grace. (shrink)

The doctrine of the Incarnation faces the following modal challenge: ‘The Son, as God, exists of necessity; Jesus, as man, exists only contingently. Therefore they cannot be one and the same.’ On the face it, the kenotic model, on which the Son gave up some of the divine properties at the Incarnation, cannot help to meet this challenge, since the suggestion that the Son gave up necessary existence implies that the necessity in question was only contingent, and this (...) notion makes no sense. A necessary being is necessarily so. This paper, however, argues that some necessities may appropriately be described as ‘contingent’, being conditional on contingent and mutable circumstances, and that there is a natural understanding of divine necessity on which the Son could give up necessary existence on becoming incarnate. (shrink)

Quentin Meillassoux: After finitude: an essay on the necessity of contingency, trans. Ray Brassier. London and New York: Continuum, 2008, 27.95 ( hb );19.95 (pb). Graham Harman, Quentin Meillassoux: Philosophy in the making, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2011, viii and 247 pp. 110.00 ( hb );32.00 (pb). Content Type Journal Article Category Book Review Pages 1-5 DOI 10.1007/s11153-012-9341-x Authors Clayton Crockett, University of Central Arkansas, 201 Donaghey Ave., Conway, AR 72035, USA Journal International Journal for Philosophy of Religion (...) Online ISSN 1572-8684 Print ISSN 0020-7047. (shrink)

How ought the historian to reconcile themselves philosophically with the fact of evental contingency and of its relationship to structural determination? Does the existence of contingent causation undermine the very concept of historical necessity, or do the two instead in dialectical entanglement? In this essay, I engage with the problem of historical contingency from a transcendental-materialist perspective informed by the work of Slavoj Žižek, tendering a philosophically serious response to the famous Pascalian conundrum of Cleopatra’s nose and (...) its challenge to structuralist accounts of historical causation. The position associated with Laplace – that is to say, that the course of history would be entirely predictable were one provided with a complete account of initial conditions – is firmly rejected. Instead, I revive Althusser’s attempt to craft a theory of ‘aleatory materialism’, in which the determinative power of structural forces nevertheless leave space for the radical and unpredictable transformation of a situation by the chance crystallisation of events and encounters. In this effort, I recruit conceptual architecture not only from the fields of historiography and philosophy, but also quantum physics, psychoanalysis, and mathematics. (shrink)

Argues that that all necessity is consequent, and that reason and God are contingent, albeit eternal, necessitiesFocusing on the central striking claim that there is something rather than nothing - that all necessity is consequent - Tritten engages with a wide range of ancient as well as contemporary philosophers including Quentin Meillassoux, Richard Kearney, Friedrich Schelling, Émile Boutroux and Markus Gabriel. He examines the ramifications of this truth arguing that even reason and God, while necessary according to essence, (...) are utterly contingent with respect to existence.Key FeaturesShows how all necessary truths are products of an epistemic framework that is itself historically contingentExplains the nature of contingency as something that stems from the facticity of being itself Explains the emergence and ontological status of reason, particularly the principle of sufficient reasonArgues for the contingency of God's existence while maintaining the necessity of his essenceProvides an alternative to Quentin Meillassoux's thesis for the necessity of contingency". (shrink)

This paper shows how a niche account of the metaphysics of laws of nature and physical properties—the Powers-BSA—can underpin both a sense in which the laws are metaphysically necessary and a sense in which it is true that the laws could have been different. The ability to reconcile entrenched disagreement should count in favour of a philosophical theory, so this paper constitutes a novel argument for the Powers-BSA by showing how it can reconcile disagreement about the laws’ modal status. This (...) paper also constitutes a defence of modal necessitarianism, the interesting and controversial view according to which all worlds are nomologically identical, because it shows how the modal necessitarian can appease the orthodox contingentist about laws. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to discuss Kripkc?s reasons for declaring the existence of both necessary a posteriori as well as contingent a priori statements, thus breaking the traditional extensional coincidence of the two pairs of concepts:necessary?contingent and a priori?a posteriori. As I shall argue, there is no reason, from Kripke?s work at least, to reject the usual picture of the topic The appeal ot his arguments rests on the ambiguity with which his expressions are used and on the (...) introduction o\ new senses for old notions. This does not mean, however, that all Knpke?s and Putnam?s intuitions on singular terms and natural kind nouns are wrong. Once Kripke?s ideas are properly uudeistood, they are much moreharmless then they are presented to be and they do not pose a threat to traditional relations relations between modal and epistemological categories. (shrink)