Lawton’s contingency thesis states that there are no useful generalizations at the level of ecological communities because these systems are especially prone to contingent historical events. I argue that this influential thesis has been grounded on the wrong kind of evidence. CT is best understood in Woodward’s terms as a claim about the instability of certain causal dependencies across different background conditions. A recent distinction between evolution and ecology reveals what an adequate test of Lawton’s thesis (...) would look like. To date, CT remains untested. But developments in genome and molecular ecology point in a promising direction. (shrink)

Much philosophical progress has been made in elucidating the idea of evolutionary contingency in a recent re-burgeoning of the debate. However, additional progress has been impaired on three fronts. The first relates to its characterisation: the under-specification of various contingency claims has made it difficult to conceptually pinpoint the scope to which ‘contingency’ allegedly extends, as well as which biological forms are in contention. That is—there appears to be no systematic means with which to fully specify (...) class='Hi'>contingency claims which has led to a tendency for authors to talk past each other. Secondly, on the matter of evidence, recent research has focused on the evidential import of convergent evolution which is taken to disconfirm the evolutionary contingency thesis. However, there has been a neglect of convergent evolution’s converse: ‘evolutionary idiosyncrasies’ or the singular evolution of certain forms, which I argue is evidentially supportive of evolutionary contingency. Thirdly, evolutionary contingency has often been claimed to vary in degrees and that the debate, itself, is a matter of ‘relative significance’. However, there has been no formal method of evaluating the strength of contingency and its relative significance in a particular domain. In this paper, I address all three issues by proposing a systematic means of fully specifying contingency theses with the concept of the modal range. Secondly, I propose an account of evolutionary idiosyncrasies, investigate the explanations for their occurrences, and, subsequently, spell out their significance with respect to the evolutionary contingency thesis. Finally, having been equipped with the evidential counterpart to convergent evolution, I shall sketch a likelihood framework for evaluating, precisely on the basis of a sequence of opposing data, the strength and relative significance of evolutionary contingency in a particular domain. With this in hand, the relative observations of idiosyncrasies and convergences can be informative of the strength and relative significance of contingency in any particular domain. (shrink)

Within the debate on the inevitability versus contingency of science for which Hacking’s writings have provided the basic terminology, the devising of counterfactual histories of science is widely assumed by champions of the contingency thesis to be an effective way to challenge the inevitability thesis. However, relatively little attention has been devoted to the problem of how to defend counterfactual history of science against the criticism that it is too speculative an endeavor to be worth bothering (...) with—the same critique traditionally levelled against the use of counterfactuals in general history. In this paper, we review the defense of counterfactuals put forward by their advocates within general history. According to such defense—which emphasizes the essential role of counterfactuals within explanations—good counterfactual scenarios need to exhibit the right kind of plausibility, characterized as continuity between said scenarios and what historians know about the world. As our discussion shows, the same requirement needs to be satisfied by good counterfactual histories of science. However, as we mention in the concluding part of the paper, there is at least one concern raised by counterfactual history of science as used to support the contingency thesis for which the defense based on the plausibility of the counterfactual scenarios does not seem to offer easy solutions. (shrink)

In this dissertation, I explore the reach of the Evolutionary Contingency Thesis—a view that emphasizes the role of dependency relations and chance in evolution. Contingency produces diverse biological entities, processes, and mechanisms. I analyze the implications of evolution’s contingency in three areas. First, I address the problem of evolutionary individuality, which concerns the nature of entities that selection acts on. If we accept Lewontin’s 1970 view that individuals are selected, then what exactly are these individuals? I (...) argue that evolutionary contingency and its diversity of outcomes causes a plurality of individuality types. These types of individuals emerge, evolve, and disappear through evolution. Second, I defend a disunified model of major transitions in evolution. Major transitions mark pivotal turning points in life’s history, such as the transition from unicellularity to multicellularity. Philosophers and biologists aim to unify evolution’s transitions by establishing a property all major events share. I argue that evolutionary contingency’s emphasis on diversity supports a disunified model of transitions. That is, we should expect numerous kinds of major transitions given the diverse sets of outcomes caused by evolutionary contingency. Finally, I extend the contingency analysis to a topic in philosophy of medicine: The nature of cancer. It is common to view cancer as a by-product of our evolution as multicelled creatures. However, Lean and Plutynski argue that cancer is also a direct product of evolution by selection. In both cases, cancer is characterized in terms of how it functions as an object of selection. I argue that the diversity among cancers suggests philosophers should shift their focus to cancers’ structural differences rather than only their functional similarities. (shrink)

The contingency of biological regularities—and its implications for the existence of biological laws—has long puzzled biologists and philosophers. The best argument for the contingency of biological regularities is John Beatty’s evolutionary contingency thesis, which will be re-analyzed here. First, I argue that in Beatty’s thesis there are two versions of strong contingency used as arguments against biological laws that have gone unnoticed by his commentators. Second, Beatty’s two different versions of strong contingency are (...) analyzed in terms of two different stabilities of regularities. Third, I argue that Beatty and his commentators have focused on the more ineffective trajectory stability version of the argument, whereas the constancy stability version provides a more substantial and applicable argument against the existence of biological laws. Fourth, I develop a counterexample to Beatty’s thesis. Finally, I discuss the possibility of evolution producing repeatable and general non-lawlike regularities and patterns by utilizing the notion of generative entrenchment and by criticizing the thesis of multiple realizability of biological properties. (shrink)

The past decade and a half has seen an absolute explosion of literature discussing the structure of reality. One particular focus here has been on the fundamental. However, while there has been extensive discussion, numerous fundamental questions about fundamentality have not been touched upon. In this chapter, I focus on one such lacuna about the modal strength of fundamentality. More specifically, I am interested in exploring the contingent fundamentality thesis - that is, the idea that the fundamentalia are only (...) contingently fundamental (or, in property-terms, that the property of being fundamental is not a (weakly) necessary property). And while I think this thesis is plausible – indeed, I show here that it lurks in the unexamined shadows/assumptions of some fairly prominent positions – as far as I can tell, nothing has been said either for or against it. Here, I hope to fix this by giving the thesis a proper airing. In this way, this chapter represents a first-pass at exploring not only the modal status of fundamentality, but also offers a starting point for examining broader issues about the relationship between fundamentality and modality. (shrink)

What is the relationship between evolutionary contingency and diversity? The evolutionary contingency thesis emphasizes dependency relations and chance as the hallmarks of evolution. While contingency can be destructive of, for example, the fragile and complex dynamics in an ecosystem, I will mainly focus on the productive or causal aspect of contingency for a particular sort of diversity. There are many sorts of diversities: Gould is most famous for his diversity-to-decimation model, which includes disparate body plans (...) distinguishing different phyla. However, structural diversity construed more broadly spans scales, such as organization in and among cells, structural arrangements and biomechanics on various scales, and even the profile of ancestor-descendent relationships or community structure of interactions within ecosystems. By focusing on stochastic processes in contingent evolution, I argue that contingency causes structural diversity. Specifically, I focus on the plurality of structural types of cells, genetic codes, and phyla diversity as case studies. (shrink)

Recently, philosophers have sought to determine the nature of individuals relevant to evolution by natural selection or evolutionary individuals. The Evolutionary Contingency Thesis is a claim about evolution that emphasizes the role of contingency or dependency relations and chance-based factors in how evolution unfolds. In this article, I argue that if we take evolutionary contingency seriously, then we should be pluralists about the types of individuals in selection.

When the necessity of identity (NI) is combined with composition as identity (CAI), the contingency of composition (CC) is at risk. In the extant literature, either NI is seen as the basis for a refutation of CAI or CAI is associated with a theory of modality, such that: either NI is renounced (if counterpart theory is adopted); or CC is renounced (if the theory of modal parts is adopted). In this paper, we investigate the prospects of a new variety (...) of CAI, which aims to preserve both NI and CC. This new variety of CAI (CCAI, contingent composition as identity) is the quite natural product of the attempt to make sense of CAI on the background of a broadly Kripkean view of modality, such that one and the same entity is allowed to exist at more than one possible world. CCAI introduces a world-relative kind of identity, which is different from standard identity, and claims that composition is this kind of world-relative identity. CCAI manages to preserve NI and CC. We compare CCAI with Gibbard’s and Gallois’ doctrines of contingent identity and we show that CCAI can be sensibly interpreted as a form of Weak CAI, that is of the thesis that composition is not standard identity, yet is significantly similar to it. (shrink)

In the presented article, I have analyzed the famous Saul Kripke statement that some a priori truths are contingent. I show, that despite Kripke’s thesis, in the historical understanding of contingency, the notions of contingency and apriority are in deep conflict with each other. In this understanding of contingency, the past, which can be known a priori, is not contingent, and the future, which is contingent, has difficulty acquiring a priori knowledge. Having stated Kripke’s thesis (...) more precisely, I propose three means in order to defend it in the historical understanding of possibility: by introducing the notion of “factual” future, by replacing the notion of apriority with the notion of apriority-in-the-future; by replacing the notion of apriority with the notion of historical apriority, and the notion of contingency with the notion of once-apriority. In the annex of the article, I present the formal analysis of the problem that I have introduced and three solutions which I have proposed in the language of temporal-modal logic of predicates for models of indeterministic time. (shrink)

In my master's thesis for physics and philosophy, I take a long and hard look at the debates surrounding Maxwell's Demon and the status of the second law of thermodynamics. I try to clarify the use of Maxwell's thought experiment in understanding the second law; to prove that the second law is contingent, given only classical mechanics and time asymmetry; to argue that the law only holds because of facts about the kinds of particles that exist in our universe; (...) to show that and why the attempts to banish the demon using fluctuations, measurements or information or erasure have been unsuccessful; and I conclude that Maxwell's Demon is alive and kicking. (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)

My primary goal in this paper is to defend the plausibility of Kripke’s thesis that there are contingent a priori truths, and to fill out some gaps in Kripke’s own account of these truths. But the strategy here adopted is, to the best of my knowledge, still unexplored and different from the one adopted both by Kripke himself and by his critics. I first argue that Kripke’s examples of such truths can only be legitimate if seen as introduced by (...) performative utterances sense). And, if this is so, we can apply the machinery of illocutionary act theory to these utterances to explain how one can have a priori knowledge of some contingent facts generated by the utterances themselves. I shall argue that the overall strategy can fill out two gaps in Kripke’s original account: first, we can explain the nature of the truth-makers of contingent a priori truths sense, broadly conceived) and, second, we can explain how contingent a priori knowledge can be transmitted from one speaker to another. (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)

In Naming and Necessity' Saul A. Kripke gives two types of examples of contingent truths knowable a priori. So he disagrees with the first leg of the thesis. As we will see later, his examples depend on the direct designation theory of names. While there have been attempts to provide examples of the contingent a priori that do not depend on that theory, most of those examples should be viewed as expansions, or modifications, of Kripke's examples. Philip Kitcher, for (...) example, gives an interesting example that has nothing to do with theories of names, but is produced using the indexical 'actual'.2 His example, however, is a variation of Kripke's Neptune Type example.' In what follows I will focus on Kripke's two types of examples and modifications of them. I will argue that although both types of example fail, it is possible to modify his Standard Metre example in such a way that we have an example of the contingent a priori. (shrink)

An error theorist about a particular discourse combines the cognitivist thesis that the discourse is truth-apt with the thesis that core statements asserted by the discourse are false. For instance, one is an error theorist about witch discourse if one thinks that witch discourse is truth-apt and that some of the entities and properties quantified over by core statements in the discourse, namely witches and magical powers, do not exist and hence that certain core statements of the discourse (...) are false. (shrink)

Where does the line between the possible and the impossible fall? One influential answer to this question is succinctly expressed by the thesis that there are no brute necessities. Typically, that thesis is taken to be non-contingent by its proponents. In this paper, I shall argue that if it is necessary, it is so brutely. From this, it follows that there could be brute necessities. But this has no tendency to show that there are any. On the resulting (...) view, the world is full of contingency—but only contingently so. (shrink)

Kripke argues that the existence of a priori contingent truths shows the falsity of the traditional idea that the notions of necessity and a priority are coextensional. In this paper, I maintain that the traditional coexistensionality thesis is defendable. I contend that the propositions that are alleged to be a priori contingent truths by Kripke are propositions that express contingent facts and, at the same time, are necessarily true. That they are necessarily true is not because of their metaphysical (...) aspects but in virtue of their epistemological properties. In regard to a priority, following Donnellan, I argue that Kripke’s fault can be explained by an appeal to the distinction between knowing that a certain sentence expresses a truth and knowing the truth of what is expressed by the sentence. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 10.3 (2003) 261-264 [Access article in PDF] Contingency, Arbitrariness, and Failure Michael Loughlin PICKERING AIMS TO affect the form of the debate about the reality of mental illness. He notices that many influential arguments both for and against the existence of mental illnesses are in an important sense circular. It is observed that a given condition is relevantly similar to conditions we all agree (...) are genuine illnesses and on the basis of this observation it is concluded that it too can be classified as a type of illness—from which it can be inferred that mental illnesses do indeed exist. But Pickering contends that the initial observation can only be made if we already construe the condition in question as a type of illness. Otherwise we may interpret the data differently.So unless we help ourselves to the categorization whose legitimacy it is supposed to establish, the likeness argument cannot get going. He illustrates his point effectively. Most of his examples are taken from authors defending the existence of mental illness and it would have been interesting to see a more detailed account of the argument working in the other direction. Even so, his references to Szasz (Pickering 2003) are sufficient to convince readers familiar with Szasz's work that a version of the likeness argument (the paradigm approach) is as much at work in his refutation of the existence of mental illnesses as is it in Boorse's proof of their reality.This is an incisive analysis, which should be taken very seriously indeed by contributors to the debate. Its most immediate implication is a negative one. We should not rely upon any version of the likeness argument to establish the existence (or nonexistence) of mental illnesses: "the likeness argument must fail" (Pickering 2003, p. 253). One important question left unanswered by the paper concerns what form the debate should take, if its criticisms are accepted. Assuming we agree that the likeness argument is methodologically flawed, what should the methodology be for debating the substantive issues at stake? Put another way, how can we break the circle? How is it possible to construct arguments that do not presuppose their main conclusions, and so to make real intellectual progress in addressing this issue? Is this in fact possible? What would a valid argument in this area look like, and what sort of observational premises (if any) would be acceptable as evidence?On the most skeptical reading of his thesis, Pickering's arguments render the ideal of intellectual progress toward a resolution of this debate strictly unattainable. The circle cannot be broken, because the theory dependence of our categorizations makes the truth about the reality of mental illness either unknowable or irredeemably relative to one's intellectual starting point. Having argued that the likeness argument fails in the case of alcoholism, Pickering states one possible response to this failure on the part of psychiatry as the concession that the classification [End Page 261] of alcoholism as an illness is "very much a matter of opinion (2003, p. 250). Because he then argues that the argument fails for logically analogous reasons in the case of schizophrenia, we may feel invited to draw the same conclusion about that condition. He later admits there is "some truth in the charge" that "the rejection of the likeness argument seems to introduce an unacceptable element of contingency into the way important questions about the categorization of schizophrenia and alcoholism are answered" (p. 253). His response to this is that it is not his arguments that lead to this element of contingency, and he reiterates that the likeness argument cannot get beyond such contingencies (p. 253).Certainly he seems committed to the view that no observational premises can "decide, or help decide, the issue" because the "detectable and observable features" of a purported mental illness "do not determine what description should be given of them" (p. 250). Even the fact that a particular description seems intuitively irresistible or "natural" cannot decide this. His argument on this point concerns the fact that what appears natural or intuitively obvious to us is... (shrink)

Debating the interpretation of the Burgess Shale fossil records, Stephen Jay Gould and Simon Conway Morris have formulated two conflicting theses regarding the nature of evolutionary processes. While Gould argued that evolution is essentially a contingent process whose outcomes are unpredictable, Conway Morris claimed that the omnipresence of convergence testifies that it is in fact deterministic, leading to predictable and inevitable outcomes. Their theses have been extensively researched from various perspectives. However, a systematic parallel analysis of the core arguments each (...) of them offered in support of their thesis has been lacking. I argue Conway Morris has successfully exposed the core weaknesses of Gould's thesis and offered a comprehensive account in favor of the major role of convergence in evolutionary history. On the other hand, I will point out some of the weak points in the latter's arguments supporting the deterministic view of life's evolution. Although Conway Morris has been more successful in arguing for the deterministic nature of the evolutionary processes, both theses could be improved if their shortcomings are taken into consideration. (shrink)

I begin by giving reasons to accept the block-universe view, the strongly supported by physics view that we live in a four-dimensional world. According to it, the past and the future are as real as the present. As a result, it seems that the future is determined in the sense that what will be the case will necessarily be the case. In the dissertation, I examine whether we have to accept this consequence. I show that we do not have to (...) bite the bullet: the future might be both real and contingent. I first start to consider modal realism (possible futures are real) as a possible solution. However, I propose then another account, actualist (positing the reality of only one possible world: the space-time we live in). This solution relies on a conventionalist theory about metaphysical modality (Sidelle, 1989). It states that modal modality is purely conventional. In combination with a realist interpretation of natural modality (causal and/or nomological), this framework allows me to propose that the future is conventionally closed and naturally contingent. In this view, the necessity of the future holds in virtue of linguistic conventions and then is conventionally necessary. But this is a distinct phenomenon from the natural contingency of the future: the future is naturally contingent because there are mind-independent probabilistic relations holding between the present and the future. This solution has strong consequences: most importantly, an anti-realist view about ordinary objects and physical particles. I end up by presenting and arguing in favour of the general image of the world that comes out from these views. (shrink)

This essay argues for the contingency of necessity. The thesis is that contingency constitutes the possibility of necessity, which is always subsequent to contingency, only contingent necessity, a mere modality of contingent being. This study posits the contingency of necessity through a reading of Quentin Meillassoux and the late lectures of F. W. J. Schelling. While Meillassoux argues for the necessity of contingency, Schelling seeks to uncover the contingency at the heart of what (...) is necessary. Although the principle of sufficient reason provides the necessary conditions for something and reason itself derives necessary truths, the fact that there is reason rather than unreason is but the contingency of a fact. (shrink)

This thesis examines necessary truth and defends a normative, or linguistic, account of it. Roughly, it holds that necessary truths state or follow from conceptual norms (i.e., norms that determine patterns of correct concept use). While the thesis touches upon logical and mathematical truth, its primary focus are those necessary truths typically expressed using natural language. The thesis has three parts. In Part I, I criticise metaphysical accounts of necessity and present and defend a normative account of (...) it. At no point do I give a history of normative accounts, but clearly their roots are to be found in the first half of the twentieth century – in the works of Wittgenstein and Carnap, for example. In Part II, I consider whether language can sustain the normative account. Some argue that the account requires language to be regimented in a way that it is not. I show that while it requires a distinction in kind between empirical and conceptual principles, it nevertheless makes room for indeterminacy regarding whether a given statement is an empirical claim or follows from conceptual norms. Finally, in Part III, I consider the relationship between the world and our conceptual scheme. I argue that denying our concepts answer to the world does not mean that they cannot be justified. The normative account does not say that we have no reasons for categorising things in a certain way, but rather that natural facts, in combination with our interests, are fit to provide them. The purpose of the thesis is to show that normative accounts of necessity can be much more robust than they are often given credit for and needn’t have the malign implications often associated with them. (shrink)

My thesis is devoted to an attempt to offer, on behalf of mathematical Platonism, a reply to what may seem to be a powerful objection to it. The objection is this: If there is, as the Platonist supposes, mathematical knowledge of abstract objects, then there is a correlation between our beliefs and the mathematical facts. However, how is such a correlation to be explained given that mathematical objects are a-causal? The worry is that no explanation is possible and that (...) this is a considerable mark against mathematical Platonism. The source of the difficulty here is obvious: standard models for explaining such correlations proceed via the idea that facts cause beliefs, or that beliefs cause facts, or that there was a common cause. But these possibilities are not available to the Platonist given the a-causality of mathematical objects. ;I claim that such a correlation is explicable in a way which neither, contra expectation, renders abstract objects causal nor assigns to us capacities the exercise of which allows to us to explain the correlation on some implausible extension of a perceptual model. The thought is this: that explaining the correlation requires explaining conjunctions of facts and beliefs. But the conjunctions in question are, at least for the Platonism here considered, conjunctions of a brute fact and an explicable fact . However I argue, and this is the core of the thesis, that such conjunctions can always be explained by reiterating the brute fact and citing whatever explains the explicable fact. If this thesis about explanation is accepted, then such correlations are readily explicable. ;The rest of the thesis is devoted to examining various objections to this reply and to the thesis concerning explanation. I argue that they are not fatal. (shrink)

Leibniz’s mature philosophical understanding of the laws of nature emerges rather suddenly in the late 1670’s to early 1680’s and is signaled by his embrace of three central theses.1 The first, what I’ll call the thesis of Contingency, suggests that the laws of nature are not only contingent, but, in some sense, paradigmatically contingent; they are supposed to provide insight into the very nature of contingency as Leibniz comes to understand it. The second, what I’ll call the (...) thesis of Providence, suggests that the laws of nature provide a basis for a new argument from design by showing how reflection on God’s ends can be positively useful in the practice of natural philosophy. The third, what I’ll call thesis of .. (shrink)

This thesis examines the function of art in Nietzsche's philosophy. Its primary concern is with Nietzsche's turn to art as the means to counter what he terms metaphysics. Metaphysics is a metonym for the system of beliefs sustaining our culture whereby human judgements about the world are perceived as uncovering an objective truth antecedent to those judgements, with an implicit faith in the possibility of exhausting the totality of these antecedent truths. This thesis consequently has two principal strands. (...) The first is to analyse Nietzsche's criticism of metaphysics. The second is to explore the way in which, using a specific understanding of art, Nietzsche attempts to reconcile extreme scepticism towards all forms of human knowledge with a continued belief in their necessity. The thesis argues that Nietzsche lays an importance on art as providing an aesthetic education to replace the misguided theoretical orientation of metaphysics. Nietzsche criticises metaphysics for its inability to recognise that its interpretations are mere interpretations, that logic and the rational serve as means to make the world meaningful from the human perspective. My thesis explores how he sees art, and in particular the tragic, as constituting a mode of world interpretation which declares its status as such. I argue that for Nietzsche this is crucial inasmuch as a failure to recognise the contingency of our interpretations results in a refusal to give value in any interpretations. For Nietzsche the advent of the Modern age heralds the danger of such refusal, and hence I argue that his turn to art is a response to the specifically Modern temptation to descend into mere cynical Nihilism. (shrink)

‘Gouldian arguments’ appeal to the contingency of a scientific domain to establish that domain’s autonomy from some body of theory. For instance, pointing to evolutionary contingency, Stephen Jay Gould suggested that natural selection alone is insufficient to explain life on the macroevolutionary scale. In analysing contingency, philosophers have provided source-independent accounts, understanding how events and processes structure history without attending to the nature of those events and processes. But Gouldian Arguments require source-dependent notions of contingency. An (...) account of contingency is source-dependent when it is indexed to some pattern and some process. Positions like Gould’s do not turn on the mere fact of life’s contingency—that life’s shape could have been different due to its sensitivity to initial conditions, path-dependence or stochasticity. Rather, Gouldian arguments require that the contingency is due to particular kinds of processes: in this case, those which microevolutionary theory cannot account for. This source-dependent perspective clarifies both debates about the nature and importance of contingency, and empirical routes for testing Gould’s thesis. (shrink)

The antinomy of future contingents is here understood as a trilemma whose horns are (a) the thesis of the closed past, (b) the thesis of the open future, and (c) the thesis that all events can be represented at any time. The latter thesis can take different forms, like the principle of bivalence or the thesis of divine foreknowledge. Different versions of (c) lead to different versions of the antinomy itself. The antinomy has been formalized. (...) It hasbeen proven that the theses (a), (b), and (c) make up an inconsistent set but are consistent with each other. Possible solutions have been considered. It has been argued that there are only two global solutions to the antinomy: radical determinism (fatalism) and retroactive causality. The latter solution has been recommended and developed. (shrink)

Although Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy desires to be postmetaphysical and posttheological, I argue in this paper that it remains structurally theological. Specifically, I argue that Meillassoux’s speculative thesis on the contingency of nature and its laws repeats at a formal level the medieval theological distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. The first part of this paper discusses how this distinction allowed medieval theologians such as Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus to understand and have faith in the (...) stable contingency of the present order of things in light of divine omnipotence. The second part of this paper discusses how Meillassoux repeats this distinction, intentionally or not, between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power in his attempt to think the absolute contingency of the laws of nature as an effect of hyper-Chaos. Although, unlike the medieval God, Meillassoux’s hyper-Chaos remains fundamentally without reason and devoid of any moral valence, I argue in the third section of this paper that Meillassoux sneaks in an existential faith in the present and future order of things with his appeal to hope in a speculative resurrection of the dead, a move that brings him further in line with the substance of the distinction between God’s absolute power and God’s ordained power. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIki is the key word of Shūzō Kuki’s The Structure of Iki, and it became one of the most widely recognized Japanese aesthetic categories mainly due to this work. However, in The Problems of Contingency, which is Kuki’s most important philosophical work, there is no discussion of iki again, and consequently, most commentators of Kuki fail to see the correlation between his theories of iki and contingency. This article, by contrast, intends to provide a new interpretation of iki (...) in the light of Kuki’s theory of contingency. The specific thesis of this paper is that aesthetic phenomena categorized as subject to the principles of iki are positively evaluated in Japanese culture just because the consciousness of iki is just one form of the consciousness of contingency, in which the awareness of alternatives to the actual situation could produce considerable spiritual entertainment for aesthetic subjects. (shrink)

The influential realist thesis that politics and morals are distinct and mutually exclusive spheres of interest is one that has been challenged within the tradition of analytic moral and political theory. Over the last 50 years, several notable liberal analytic philosophers, including Isaiah Berlin, Stuart Hampshire, and Thomas Nagel, have argued that not only is politics not separate from and inimical to ethics but that there exists such a thing as political morality. This article contends that while the notion (...) of political morality may make more sense of what is regarded as a central and troubling problem of politics, it also forces us to confront the more fundamental challenge of the radical contingency of our moral and political predicament. Whether analytic political theory is capable of producing a convincing response to the latter challenge remains precariously unclear. (shrink)

This paper has a twofold purpose. First, it aims at highlighting one difference in how counterfactuals work in general history, on the one hand, and in history of the natural sciences, on the other hand. As we show, both in general history and in history of science good counterfactual narratives need to be plausible, where plausibility is construed as appropriate continuity of both the antecedent and the consequent of the counterfactual with what we know about the world. However, in general (...) history it is often possible to imagine a consequent dramatically different from the actual historical development, and yet plausible; in history of science, due to plausibility concerns, imagining a consequent far removed from the results of actual science seems more complicated. The second aim of the paper is to assess whether and to what degree counterfactual histories of science can advance the cause of the so-called “contingency thesis,” namely, the claim that history of science might have followed a path leading to alternative, non-equivalent theories, as successful as the ones that we currently embrace. We distinguish various versions of the contingency thesis and argue that counterfactual histories of science support weak versions of the thesis. (shrink)

This book discusses fundamental topics on contemporary Ockhamism. The collected essays show how contemporary Ockhamism can impact areas of research such as semantics, metaphysics and also the philosophy of science. In addition, the volume hosts one historian of Medieval philosophy who investigates the way in which William of Ockham “in flesh and bone” construed time and, more generally, future contingency. The essays explore the different meanings of this theory. They cover three main topics, in particular. The first examines the (...) thesis that sentences and propositions about the future have a definite truth value, without any ensuing commitment to determinism or fatalism. The second topic looks at the problem whether the branching-time model needs to countenance a privileged branch (the so-called Thin Red Line). Finally, the third topic considers the idea that there are so-called soft facts. These would be the subject matter of sentences and propositions verbally about the present or the past, but metaphysically about a later time, and which might change in the future. Overall, the book provides an updated and rigorous idea of the debate about Ockhamism. It gives readers a deeper understanding into this philosophical approach influenced by William of Ockham, characterized by the rejection of the Aristotelian idea that, in order to preserve the contingency of the future, future contingents must be deemed neither true nor false. (shrink)

The text reconstructs central theoretical positions in the discourse of modernity in the Weimar Republic in the double semantic context of crisis and contingency. On the one hand, these categories ground the dialectic of destruction and construction, which provides hegemonial evidence for the political and aesthetic concepts of totality in classical modernity. On the other hand, these categories also ground the openness of a thinking in possibilities, which remained marginal in the Weimar Republic but has become dominant in the (...) postmodern critique of modernity. (shrink)

Robert Adams’s Finite and Infinite Goods is one of the most important and innovative contributions to theistic ethics in recent memory. This article identifies two major flaws at the heart of Adams’s theory: his notion of intrinsic value and his claim that ‘excellence’ or finite goodness is constituted by resemblance to God. I first elucidate Adams’s complex, frequently misunderstood claims concerning intrinsic value and Godlikeness. I then contend that Adams’s notion of intrinsic value cannot explain what it could mean for (...) countless finite goods to be intrinsically valuable. Next, I articulate a criticism of his Godlikeness thesis altogether unlike those he has previously addressed: I show that, on Adams’s own account of Godlikeness, a diverse myriad of excellences could not possibly count as resembling God. His theory thus fails to account for a whole world of finite goods. I defend my two criticisms against objections and briefly sketch a more Aristotelian and Christian way forward. (shrink)

Irony is nothing new to philosophy; quite the contrary, it is as familiar as the figure of Socrates. Yet when, for example, Socrates asks Euthyphro to teach him about piety because of Euthyphro's obvious knowledge of the subject, Socrates‘ irony has little philosophical significance. Socrates says something contrary to what he means, and Euthyphro in his arrogance takes the statement literally. Plato uses Socratic irony to dramatic affect by allowing the events of the drama to unfold in such a way (...) that it becomes clear that Socrates’ literal praise of Euthyphro’s knowledge is incongruous with the results of the discussion taking place, although Euthyphro is hardly aware of the incongruity. The significance of this literary technique is that the reader be made conscious of the possibility of his own arrogance and the hindrance this would create to true philosophical understanding. As important as this use of irony is to Plato's Socratic dialogues, the irony is not the philosophical thesis. (shrink)

The paper provides an account of necessary truths in Berkeley based upon his divine language model. If the thesis of the paper is correct, not all Berkeleian necessary truths can be known a priori.

This paper explores the constellation of fear and the social forces, assumptions and images that construct it. The paper’s underlying presupposition is that there are many locations for fear that run parallel to one another in modernity, one of which will be discussed here – the city. It begins by exploring two images and ideas of the city, around which the social theoretical tradition has revolved, both of which are linked in some way to the ideal of the metropolis and (...) the counter-ideal of the stranger. The stranger invariably accompanies the image of the city, as someone who comes to it from the outside. This co-existence between integration and the experience of being outside generates the inner tension or unease of city life, especially when we are all strangers. (shrink)

This essay critically comments on Contingent Future Persons (1997), an anthology of thirteen papers on the same topic as Obligations to Future Generations (1978), namely, the morality of decisions affecting the existence, number and identity of future persons. In my discussion, I identify the basic point of dispute between R. M. Hare and Michael Lockwood on potentiality; I criticize Nick Fotion's thesis that the Repugnant Conclusion is too far-fetched to be philosophically valuable; I object to Clark Wolf's "Impure Consequentialist (...) Theory of Obligation"; and I discuss the Non-Identity Problem in connection with essays by Robert Elliot and Ingmar Persson. (shrink)

According to the Principle of Sufficient Reason every event is determined down to the smallest detail. This principle entails a global determinism which is connected with the claim of uniformity: All things are basically one and differ only by degrees. Accordingly, Leibniz tries to explain the traditional distinction of necessity and contingency by the difference between a definite demonstration and an open, never ending analysis, that is a quantitative difference between the finite and infinite. It is controversial whether (...) class='Hi'>contingency can be saved by this conception in the face of the thesis: Every predicate which can be truly attributed to a subject is included in the complete notion of this individual substance. The difficulties of the Lucky Proof can only be avoided by supposing: The infinity of analysis cannot be based on the fact that the complete notion is a simple conjunction of innumerable predicates which are not conceptually connected to each other. Then every predicate could be deduced from it in a finite number of steps; therefore, it would have been demonstrated and would consequently be necessary. The infinity of analysis cannot be either based on the fact that it is infinitely complex to prove that the subject is not contradictory. Conceptions like this or a superessentialism are not adequate, because they fail to distinguish between necessary and contingent statements about an individual within a single possible world. The complete notion and, therefore, the analysis of a contingent truth comprises an infinitely complex content, because the predicates of an individual are connected by infinitely complex relations. This corresponds to the idea that the perceptions of an individual mirror the infinitely complex connections by which the world is determined. (shrink)

This light revision of Bornholdt's doctoral thesis (Würzburg, 2015) is effectively a medievally-oriented follow-up to Richard Gaskin’s 'The Sea Battle and the Master Argument' (1995). The book is stimulating from a philosophical point of view, but the exegesis is disappointingly unreliable.

In this paper I undermine the Entailment Principle according to which if an entity is a truthmaker for a certain proposition and this proposition entails another, then the entity in question is a truthmaker for the latter proposition. I argue that the two most promising versions of the principle entail the popular but false Conjunction Thesis, namely that a truthmaker for a conjunction is a truthmaker for its conjuncts. One promising version of the principle understands entailment as strict implication (...) but restricts the field of application of the principle to purely contingent truths (i.e. those that contain no necessary proposition at any level of analysis). But a conjunction of purely contingent truths strictly implies its conjuncts. So this version of the principle is committed to the Conjunction Thesis. The same is true of the version of the principle where entailment is understood in the sense of systems T, R, and E of relevant logic, since in these systems conjunctions entail their conjuncts. I argue that the Conjunction Thesis is false because a truthmaker is that in virtue of what a certain proposition is true and it is false that, for example, what the proposition that Peter is a man is true in virtue of is the conjunctive fact that Peter is man and Saturn is a planet (or the facts that Peter is a man and that Saturn is a planet taken together). I also argue against other versions of the principle. (shrink)

According to classical theism, contingent beings find the ultimate explanation for their existence in a maximally perfect, necessary being who transcends the natural world and wills its acts in accordance with reasons. I contend that if this thesis is true, it is likely that contingent reality is vastly greater than what current scientific theory or even speculation fancies. After considering the implications of this contention for the extent of divine freedom, I go on to discuss its relevance to the (...) problem of evil as an obstacle to rational theistic belief. (shrink)

To be fair to Robinson, it is worth mentioning that he does offer a number of qualifications to his thesis. He tries to avoid excessive determinism and at one point suggests:A satisfactory account should not imply an evolutionary notion and should leave open the possibility of historic discontinuities and of contingencies that generate alternative pathways of development, including alternative futures.In other words, maybe this embryonic TNS will never progress beyond its current stage or perhaps it will continue to grow (...) but it will never become a real state. But the main thrust of Robinson’s account is strongly deterministic. In fact, he does not consider a single factor that might impede the unity of the global bourgoisie or derail transnational state formation.In a sense, Robinson’s mistake is that he has tried to derive a theoretical solution to a concrete problem that global capitalism has not yet solved in practice. While it might well be a logical step for capitalist elites to create a Transnational State, it is always risky to attribute too much rationality to an order that is notorious for its contradictions. (shrink)

Are the categorical laws of ontology metaphysically contingent? I do not intend to give a full answer to this question in this paper. But I shall give a partial answer to it. In particular, Gideon Rosen, in his article “The Limits of Contingency”, has distinguished a certain conception of metaphysical necessity, which he calls the Non-Standard conception, which, together with the assumption that all natures or essences are Kantian, is supposed to entail that many laws of ontology are metaphysically (...) contingent. Now, the argument Rosen gives supports the conclusion that all categorical laws of ontology are contingent. I shall argue that the Non-Standard conception and the thesis that all natures are Kantian are incompatible with each other and that, if the Non-Standard conception is true, there must be at least one metaphysically necessary categorical law of ontology, and I shall identify such a law. Thus my contribution to the question of the title of the paper will be that not all categorical ontological laws can be contingent if the Non-Standard conception is true. (shrink)

This paper takes as its point of departure Merleau-Ponty’s assertion: “everything will have to begin again, in politics as well as in philosophy”. In pursuing his later work, Merleau-Ponty signalled the need for a reconfiguration of his philosophical vision, so it was no longer caught in Cartesianism and the philosophy of consciousness. This required a turn towards ontology through which he consolidated two key ideas: firstly, a pervasive interdependence articulated in his reversibility thesis and the ontology of ‘flesh’; secondly, (...) a radical contingency at the heart of existence. This paper interrogates the political implications of these ideas, and specifically regarding humanism and human progress. Relatedly, I address the question – how might recognitions of ontological interdependence and radical contingency support a flourishing democracy? Merleau-Ponty’s early political work concerned the issues of his day – Nazism, Marxism and the status of humanism – and did not engage extensively with these emerging onto-political concerns. Nonetheless, there are indicative reflections in the writings and interviews; the political implications of his ontological interrogations become more thematic in the later works. There is no rupture between the earlier and later works regarding his philosophical vision, although he later distanced himself from Marxism with revelations of the gulags under Stalin and the Korean War. The overarching claim of this paper – we need to rethink politics from the ground up beginning with ontology; ontology is political and the political is intrinsically ontologically informed. Getting the ontology ‘right’ is a matter of discovery and not theory choice. (shrink)

Kripke argued for the existence of necessary a posteriori truths and offered different accounts of why certain necessary truths seem to be contingent. One of these accounts was used by Kripke in an argument against the psychophysical identity thesis. I defend the claim that the explanatory force of Kripke's standard account of the appearance of contingency relies on the explanatory force of one of the more general accounts he also offers. But the more general account cannot be used (...) to undermine the psychophysical identity thesis. Specifically, a crucial feature in Kripke's standard account, which is needed to argue for dualism, is explanatorily superfluous. Alternative accounts that are similar to Kripke's original one but lack that trait would also explain the phenomenon. Consequently, the Kripkean dualist argument is blocked. /// Kripke ha argumentado que existen verdades necesarias a posteriori, y ha ofrecido diferentes explicaciones de por qué ciertas verdades necesarias parecen contingentes. Una de esas explicaciones se usaba en un argumento con el que Kripke criticaba la tesis de la identidad psicofísica. En este trabajo sostengo que la fuerza explicativa de la explicacion kripkeana estándar de la apariencia de contingencia depende de la fuerza explicativa de una de las otras explicaciones que Kripke también propone. Pero esa otra explicación, más general, no sirve para rechazar la identidad psicofísica. Con-cretamente, un rasgo crucial de la explicación kripkeana estandar resulta explicativamente superfluo. Explicaciones alternativas, similares a la de Kripke pero que carezcan de ese rasgo, explicarían también el fenómeno. Como consecuencia, el argumento dualista kripkeano queda bloqueado. (shrink)