Contingency

This paper is on Descartes' account of modality and, in particular, his account of the necessity of the laws of nature. He famously argues that the necessity of the "eternal truths" of logic and mathematics depends on God's will. Here I suggest he has the same view about the necessity of the laws of nature. Further, I argue, this is a plausible theory of laws. For philosophers often talk about something being physically necessary because of the laws of nature, but this necessity is thought to be metaphysically contingent. However, they struggle to explain how the laws could be genuinely necessary while being metaphysically contingent. The chief advantage of Descartes' view, I argue, is that God's will can plausibly explain both the necessity of the laws (because God made them necessary) and the contingency of the laws (because God could have done otherwise). So, Descartes' theistic account of laws provides a plausible explanation, perhaps the best explanation, of the contingent-necessity of laws of nature.

Video/sound recorders with high data storage capacities, hi-resolution and low light capabilities of miniature high-definition tapeless cameras , solid state surveillance cams, dashboard and body cameras and most crucially, the ubiquitous smart phone with capabilities for live-streaming via social media are transforming the dynamics of the interactions between law enforcement officials and citizenry in the United States. That both public and private law enforcement officers in the United States are almost always armed in their confrontations with citizens is deeply connected to the often antagonistic and violent history of American law enforcement. The emerging continuous, single shot, digital video documents that people are self-streaming and recording as protection when encountering the police and other figures of state authority have begun to transform the national discourse on police violence. These videos are documents whose narrative directions are still evolving in the moment of recording, so outcomes and meanings of the events seen and heard cannot be neatly narrated. Instead, they reveal the immediate present as an unfolding problem for representation , which is often incomplete and always contingent. Thus the very in-determinacy of outcome caused by the presence of the cameras becomes a stage for resistance to state authority. What the recordings document gives insight into what I am calling the time of resistance, a performative mode in which the technology allows the filmer to destabilizethe temporality of their interaction with authority, by shifting the dynamic of power in the interaction and, in the process, momentarily denaturalizing the terms of power.

This essay attempts to clarify Leibniz’s theories of freedom and contingency by viewing them against the backdrop of his efforts to reengineer important philosophical concepts. In developing a concept of freedom, Leibniz is above all concerned to preserve divine and human responsibility (Section 1). His account of freedom requires him to reject necessitarianism, that is, the view that all things are absolutely necessary (Section 2). Leibniz therefore carves out two concepts of contingency. The first is centered on the thought that something may be contingent considered by itself – that is, per se – even if it is necessary in light of God’s goodness or will (Section 3). The second is centered on the thought that it may be possible to draw a distinction between contingent and necessary propositions in terms of logic alone (Section 4).

Kit Fine has proposed a new solution to what he calls 'a familiar puzzle' concerning modality and existence. The puzzle concerns the argument from the alleged truths 'It is necessary that Socrates is a man' and 'It is possible that Socrates does not exist' to the apparent falsehood 'It is possible that Socrates is a man and does not exist'. We discuss in detail Fine's setting up of the 'puzzle' and his rejection, with which we concur, of two mooted solutions to it. (One of these uses standard, Kripkean, notions, and the other rests on work done by Arthur Prior.) We set out, and reject, the philosophy of modality underlying Fine's new solution, and we defend an alternative response to the alleged puzzle. Our solution follows the work of David Wiggins in distinguishing between the sentential operator 'It is necessary that' and the predicate modifier 'necessarily'. We briefly provide this distinction with a possible-world semantics on which it is neither a necessary truth, in some sense, that Socrates exists nor true, in some sense, that Socrates necessarily exists.

We introduce an agent-based model of interaction, drawing on the contingency approach from Luhmann's theory of social systems. The agent interactions are defined by the exchange of distinct messages. Message selection is based on the history of the interaction and developed within the confines of the problem of double contingency. We examine interaction strategies in the light of the message-exchange description using analytical and computational methods.

From the mid-1990’s on, contingency developed into one of the leading
key concepts of the social science and achieved an axiomatic status in leftist political and social theory, first and foremost through the central postmarxist thesis of the “Lack of Foundations in the Social”. That the Renaissance of contingency is embedded in the historical parallel rise of decisionistic theories, which helped make the concept popular again, is the historical situation from where the argument in the article starts and which provoked the following research question: are the historical parallel renaissances of contingency and decision based theories coincidental or is their logical relation necessary? The goal of the first chapter is to outline the semantic complexity of contingency and its context-dependent varieties. Two extremes of the concept will be separated from each other. One of those extremes, today’s popular one, will be identified as decisionisms corresponding contingency. The discussion of why decisionistic arguments are a problem within theories with progressive intentions, will conclude the article.

Many mining and development experts consider artisanal diamond mining to be a form of gambling. In Sierra Leone’s mining areas, this comparison also recurs occasionally in miners’ discourses. However, the idea that mining is like gambling deserves critical scrutiny as it allows only a limited, stereotypical representation of this work. This article considers mining as a complex combination of material production and imaginaries oriented by a specific ethic. Central to the understanding of this ethic is a repertoire of religious metaphors that inform miners’ working and ritual practices.
By drawing upon my ethnographic experience in Sierra Leone (2007–2011), I examine the vocabulary of contingency which the miners use to make sense of their successes and failures and guide their daily decision-making. Moreover, I show how this vocabulary mirrors the daily efforts  of miners in (re)producing the social reality in and around diamond mines. What I mean to  highlight is the ways in which diamond miners challenge dominant discourses depicting them as immoral, antisocial agents.

The research on loadshedding issues dates back to 1972 and till date many studies were introduced by the research community to address the issues. A closer review of existing techniques shows that still the effectiveness of loadshedding schemes are not yet benchmarked and majority of the existing system just considers the techniques to be quite symptomatic to either frequency or voltage. With an evolution of smart grids, majority of the controlling features of power system and networks are governed by a computational model. However, till date not enough evidences of potential computational model has been seen that claims to have better balance between the load shedding schemes and quality of power system performance. Hence, we review some significant literatures and highlights the research gap with the existing technqiues of load balancing that is meant for assisting the researcher to conclude after the selection process of existing system as a reference for future direction of study.

Organizations in the 21 st century deal with constant changes such as globalization, technological evolutions, regulatory changes, competition, and other unexpected events, among others. These challenges can be viewed and addressed through the lenses of contemporary theories. This paper selected three contemporary theories namely chaos, complexity, and contingency theories, and presented their foundations and characteristics by comparing and contrasting their key concepts. These concepts include nonlinearity, feedback, bifurcation, strange attractors, fractals, and self-organization for chaos theory; nonlinearity, dynamism, feedback, self-organization, emergence, and adaptability for complexity theory; and adaptation, equifinality, effectiveness, and congruency for contingency theory. Examples of studies and organizational applications of these theories were provided, and implications for scholars and organizational leaders were discussed. By explaining notions such as how the capacity of a system could be greater than the sum of the capacities of its subunits, this paper can act as a starting point for anyone seeking to understand the three theories or use them for research or organizational purposes.

Studies on dynamics of power relationship play a significant role in the collaborative governance literature because many issues and challenges in collaborative governance can be linked to power asymmetry in collaboration. This article proposes a contingency framework on power asymmetry in collaborative governance that includes six contingency factors of power sharing from contextual, network, and node perspectives. We focus on how each contingency factor influences the relationship between power sharing and the effectiveness of collaborative governance and suggest that, instead of focusing on the attempt to balance power and share power in collaboration, it will be more fruitful to design and implement collaborative arrangements based on the dynamic contingencies.

It is common to hear about academics’ personal lives in terms of a lack. We know, for instance, that academics have fewer children, marry less, and work longer hours than those in other ‘professions’ (Mason et al. 2013; NTEU 2015). The growing population of precariously employed academics is understood as especially afflicted, with couples and families needing to move or separate for work, and living with low, irregular pay and limited or no leave. These issues disproportionately impact women, and particularly young women, as this group is overrepresented in precarious academia (May et al. 2013).

Based on the ethnographic study of the card game Bela, this paper rethinks the intersections and interstices between game and non-game contexts, challenging the presumption that play is unproductive and non-materialistic. By embedding the rules of the game into its socio-cultural context, the paper identifies a symbolic space of shared stories, emotions and personal interests that coexist with, modify and lubricate the rules of the game. By considering play as a way of engaging the world, rather than a categorically identified, bounded and thus inconsequential activity, I explore how the open-endedness of the card game relates to broader life experiences, and particularly how it shapes and influences perceptions of work and productivity.

I. Modernity as " âge de mode " Fashion is a typically modern phenomenon-­‐ in the sense that it only exists in modern society, and in the sense that it expresses in a concentrated way the essence of modernity. This is the assumption underlying the present article, which I will try to illustrate and comment in the following pages. This approach can be surprising, because we often think that fashion existed in all societies, and also because we tend to define modernity on the basis of more "serious" phenomena, like the emergence of scientific rationality or of national states. But fashion, in its apparent frivolity, involves crucial aspects of modern semantics, as the forms of individuality and the relationship with time. The key issue, as we shall see, is the concept of contingency, which in modern times acquires a new significance and unprecedented significance, illustrated by fashion and its forms. Why modernity leads to these changes is an enigmatic question, although the concept continues to attract the attention of scholars, especially in the fields of sociology and history of ideas. What we can observe, however, is the gradual dissolution of the ordered setting of traditional semantics and the transition to a different form of order-­‐ vastly more flexible, contingent, compatible with components of disorder. The univocal order of the cosmos, as it was reflected in metaphysics and theology, but also in the systems of rhetoric and of various disciplines, gives way to a plurality of orders not always coordinated, with criteria, methods and priorities that are different and independent from each other.

In this paper I examine the role of Thomas Aquinas’ cosmological arguments in the natural theologies of early modern Calvinism. Some of the first Calvinistic forays into theistic proofs make use of Thomist arguments which allow for the logical possibility of creation from eternity. In the seventeenth century, many Reformed theologians prefer to use arguments against the possibility of an eternal world—arguments which had been defended by medieval theologians such as Bonaventure. But these arguments in turn faced criticism in the seventeenth century, and many of the Reformed supplemented them or replaced them with others. The argument from the mutability of the world to its temporal beginning became increasingly popular among Calvinists. Historical arguments from the recent rise of arts and sciences or biological species supplemented the philosophical arguments for the world’s beginning. Their theological commitment to the impossibility of eternal creation may explain why the Reformed did not typically use the Clarke/Leibniz argument from contingency.

В знаковой для спекулятивного реализма книге К. Мейясу решается задача получения доступа к «реальности как она есть». Выдвигаются аргументы против корреляционизма классической философии, главным из которых является отказ от принципа необходимости достаточного основания в пользу принципа контингентной фактичности. В качестве нового «недогматического» Абсолюта вводится понятие математизированного Хаоса.Посттеоретический (спекулятивный) реализм есть отражение экспансии искусственной виртуальной реальности, претендующий на парадигмальное объяснение всего сущего. Как превращенная форма философии computer science он обосновывает конечность предметной физической реальности, тем самым лишая человека его жизненного мира. Это вариант нигитологии и проявление апофатического состояния современного сознания. Спекулятивному реализму противопоставляется философия феноменологического субстанциализма. Анализ текста показывает, что это эссенциалистский аналог идей структурализма, онтологии коммуникации и синергетики, которые более убедительно уже разработаны в методологии науки. Сохранение Homo Genus (родового человека) возможно только при условии сохранения его жизненного мира как фактичности «нашей реализации» одного из возможных миров. Философия такого подхода опирается на диалектику нелинейного взаимодействия необходимого и случайного, что допускает существование различных вариантов развития, не отменяя причинных оснований для них.
The landmark for speculative realism book of Q. Meillassoux solves the problem of gaining access to the “reality as it is”. The arguments are put forward against correlationism of classical philosophy, the main of which is the refusal of the principle of necessity of sufficient foundation to the benefit of the principle of contingent facticity. As the new “non-dogmatic” Absolute in introduced the notion of mathematized Chaos. The post-theoretical  (speculative) realism is the reflection of expansion of the artificial virtual reality that claims the paradigmatic explanation of all things in existence. As the converted form of philosophy computer science, he substantiates the finitude of the substantive physical reality by depriving human of his lifeworld. This is the version of nihility and manifestation of apophatic state of modern consciousness. Speculative realism is opposed to the philosophy of phenomenological substantialism. Analysis of the text demonstrates that this is essentialistic analogy of the ideas of structuralism, ontology of communication and synergetics that were formulated more persuasively in the methodology of science. Preservation of Homo Genus is attainable only in terms of preserving his lifeworld as the facticity of “realization” of one of the possible worlds. The philosophy of such approach leans on the dialectics of nonlinear interaction between the necessary and contingent, which allows the existence of various scenarios without rescinding the causes of origin.

This article briefly outlines the history of the colonial diamond industry of Sierra Leone from 1930 to 1961, highlighting its contingent aspects and the bonds guiding the decisions and actions taken by local social actors in different contexts and at different times. By drawing on colonial documents and memoirs of colonial officers, it shows how the colonial government of Sierra Leone and the mining company that exercised a monopoly on diamond extraction collaborated on the establishment of a series of legislative and disciplinary devices that encompassed forms of biopolitical expertise.

This is a partial translation of Kuki Shūzō's "Gūzensei-no mondai" 偶然性の問題 (1935). This translation is a work in progress and if you have any suggestions, criticisms, questions, etc., please feel free to contact the translator.
Special thanks to Sean Winkler for his variable comments on the text.

Fondandosi ampiamente sulla teoria dei sistemi autoreferenziali di Niklas Luhmann, il presente elaborato si propone di descrivere la coscienza quale sistema di pensieri che producono pensieri e che si differenzia dal suo ambiente proprio per mezzo di tale autoriproduzione. I primi due capitoli illustrano quindi i principali concetti della teoria luhmanniana: distinzione sistema/ambiente, autoreferenza, autopoiesi, chiusura operativa, complessità, struttura, osservazione, senso, interpenetrazione. Il terzo capitolo, invece, concentra la riflessione sul sistema psichico o coscienza e affronta questioni come quella dell’inconscio e dell’inconsapevolezza, della contingenza e del libero arbitrio, fino alla costituzione dell’identità da parte della coscienza mediante una triplice distinzione nei confronti del corpo vissuto, della propria storia e della propria persona. In particolare, in forza di quest’ultimo costrutto, risulterà chiaro come coscienza e società – pur chiuse nei rispettivi confini operativi – contribuiscano alla reciproca costruzione, in un gioco di osservazioni in cui l’una e l’altra si auto-osservano e si scoprono contestualmente esposte ad altri osservatori che le osservano.

The purpose of this work is to comprehend the importance and scope of chance in the poetry of Mallarmé. In order to do that, we will proceed according to a three-pronged approach; recompose the political, poetic and philosophical context that made possible the emergence and establishment of chance as an event both revolutionary, creative and conceptual. Since Baudelaire, poetry sings the failed revolutions, but willing to preserve the desire for a different world. Chance in this context is the unpredictable bursts, lightning and transient of a desire that can not find its place within the social life, to keep alive and vivid the dream of a different world, poetry must: provide evidence that its action, even restricted, counts; make last chance doomed to fade, constituting a space where it can remain, multiply itself and thus find the consistency to remain.  Prolonging a contingency that creates novelty is the task that Mallarmé attributes to his poetry.  Philosophically, this approach requires a radical critique of reason and representation. In this context, Mallarmé has not only announced chance, but he sought to discover the logic of what escapes from reason composing a work capable of making real, visible and intelligible, the unpredictable and inexhaustible power that chance grips.

Moral obligations seem to make claims that are both objective and universally binding. However, do we have any reasons to abide by morality? If we do, are such reasons grounded in our culture or in our nature as human beings, or do they otherwise derive from rationality itself? In the first case, reasons apply authoritatively only to a given group or community at a given time. In the second, moral reasons bind us in a broad but contingent manner. In the third case, a strong argument can be made that by rooting reasons for moral action in rationality, one vindicates moral claims that are both universal and authoritative. This is an appealing prospect only insofar as rationality itself binds us all with normative authority and offers us normative reasons for action.

To account for ethical constructivism as a distinctive cluster of theories, in this essay, I give serious credence to the notion of “construction” as a label for a distinctive mode of rational justification that also captures the authoritative nature of normative truths. Construction names the correct form of practical reasoning that constitutes or explains normative truths, principles, and values. Thus understood, the metaphor of construction is not a mere heuristic; it carries a distinct explanatory force.

This approach promises a more perspicuous definition of constructivism, which accommodates the various strains of constructivism and explains what unifies them by focusing on three nodal elements: its agents, method, and target domain. The varieties of constructivism will be distinguished by specifying the nodes of the construction. By identifying their distinctive features, we will be better poised to assess their merits. We will pay particular attention to their capacity to address the problems that they are designed to answer, as well as the resources available to respond to the challenges posed by their opponents. However, the main task of this volume is to illustrate how constructivism has contributed to reformulating the central problems in metaethics regarding the nature of normative and moral reasons. Instead of moral constructivism, this essay will focus on constructivist theories about practical reason, with special attention to moral norms. Despite the formidable challenges that such theories face, they have substantially modified and expanded the agenda of metaethics to include issues on the normative dimensions of reasoning and moral authority, which are not yet fully explored. The scope of inquiry is limited in two ways. First, the volume does not have the ambition to address all constructivist theories advanced in the history of philosophy; thus, there are many worthwhile theories that are left out. Second, within the narrow debate under consideration, the focus is on metaethical issues rather than on constructivist methods which provide guidance in first-order moral theorizing. In particular, I have organized the debate around the constructivist attempts to defend ethical objectivity against the challenges posited by contingency.

This paper examines the Confucian concept of tian, conventionally translated into English as “Heaven.” The secondary literature on tian has primarily focused on the question of what tian is: e.g., whether tian is an anthropomorphic deity or a naturalistic force, or whether tian is transcendent or immanent. Instead, this paper locates tian with respect to the ethical life of human beings, and argues that the two conflicting concepts of “moral economy” and “contingency” are main characteristics of tian. This paper further investigates these characteristics in Kongzi’s and Mengzi’s ethical thought: how they conceptualized moral economy and contingency, and how their different conceptualizations shaped their respective ethical programs: Kongzi’s ethics of faith and Mengzi’s ethics of confidence.

A fictional work has various perspectives that are indispensable to construct a particular possible world.  The reader is supposed to surmise the principle mechanism that is associated with all the elements of the fictional world, together with the semantic extension behind the individual events.  In some speculative works those world axes can be quite different from the ones that establish our own phenomenal world.  But authors with very reflective turn sometimes attempt to create a quite vague fictional world that will not disclose its genre peculiarity easily, by means of presenting only limited number of information that may suggest the existence of world axes, in order to give the audience the feeling that they are witnessing just only partial phase of an unknown world.  Such is the directing strategy adopted in the anime show, Madlax.
In Madlax, the audience has to gather information through the characteristic property of the minutely detailed descriptions portrayed just as coincidental phenomena.  A fictional work has the creative demand to be adopted as constructing a peculiar “fictional meaning” through a series of events that scientific view of the world might just dispose of as “mere coincidence”.  The claim of detecting the fundamental meaning that has been orchestrated in the contingency in fictional description, reversely suggests the existence of a comprehensive global solution formula to be accepted by introducing an unknown mechanism, that enables us to comprehend the organic continuum of the whole universe where matter and mind are inseparably linked.
But the fictional world Madlax presents, is densely organized with rich “hyper-real” concrete details, so as to avoid being determined easily as the semantic projection incorporated into existing conceptual category, and establishes the sense that the work must belong to some unknown category with the basic axes loaded with uncertainties of another possible world.  The audience is forced to continue to check the fictional specific phenomena full of contaminants revealed one by one, without being able to corroborate the coordinate origin, in search of unified meaning all the way through.  But one is never sure whether the show is attempting to present a meta subject overthrowing the conventional commitments of reading the implicit meaning in the work, or establishing another meta subject that an integrated meaning construction of further high-dimensional perspective is to be disclosed.
In Madlax, genre axes are dislocated so as to annihilate the distinction of existence, phenomenon and individuality.  This anime surprisingly innovates the motif of division of personality and generation of shadow adopted in many fantasy works since 19th century, in a manner very reflective of contemporary worldview infused with the ideas that construct the quantum physics.

Tacitus’ fullest treatment of Augustus comes at the beginning of the Annals, Book 1.9-10. A close reading of these two paragraphs will show that the Augustan center of power was susceptible to influence, though not from below, not from individuals: opposition had been obliterated. Nor was the Augustan center of power susceptible to influence even from corporate bodies like the Senate, the praetorian guard, or the armies. Rather, Augustus was susceptible to the changing circumstances in which he found himself, to the vicissitudes of fortune that assail from all directions; and he was subject to the choices he made at any given moment in response to his circumstances. Neither the Augustan institution nor attitudes toward it were static entities but the result of dynamic processes. If we lend ourselves to the ironies of the passage, then we begin to see the importance of change over time and to recognize that centers of power are susceptible—that they are created and maintained by their vulnerabilities as much as by the exercise of sheer force or domination. While not interested in rehabilitating Augustus, I recognize that such an argument at times teeters on the brink of revisionism; yet scholars unanimously agree that Tacitus provides more than enough material to temper even the most sanguine reading.

This article presents and explains Alvin Plantinga’s objections against the traditional doctrine of divine simplicity, with a special focus on the objection based on the incompatibility between divine simplicity and the free character of the act of creation. The article analyses and weighs different responses to this objection coming from the Classical Theistic perspective of Thomas Aquinas: a) the rejection of possible worlds semantics; b) the distinction between absolute and hypothetical necessity; c) the denial of God’s trans-world identity; d) the extrinsic character of God’s relational properties. A nuanced version of this last response is proposed and defended.