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Does chance really exist, or is it rather an expression of our ignorance of the laws of nature or of divine providence? Learn from Radboud scholars what philosophers, physicists and mathematicians have thought about chance over the centuries, and think about it some more.

Changing meanings

In fact, you can only understand what chance is if you understand what it is not. Throughout history, thinkers have defined chance as the antithesis of several concepts: necessity, predictability, regularity, intention, efficiency, or providence. This course explores all these meanings and models of reality: from the Greek philosopher Aristotle to quantum mechanics.  

Natural sciences

Indeed, not only in philosophy, but also in the natural sciences, a lot of thought has gone into randomness. For a while, people tried to eliminate the concept of chance because it did not fit into a deterministic worldview, a worldview in which everything is predestined. In the 18th century, the French mathematician Laplace thought that if you knew all the laws of nature and the state of all the particles of matter, you could predict any future event. But with Darwin's theory of evolution in the nineteenth century and quantum mechanics in the twentieth, chance reentered the natural sciences.

Programme

1. The origins of the concept of chance: What do we understand by the word 'chance'? What did the philosopher Aristotle (4th century BC) think about chance? And what was the debate among the ancient Greeks about the meaning of the word?
2. Necessity, chance and destiny: Suppose there are no gods: is nature governed by necessity or chance? Suppose there are gods: how does their providence relate to everyday reality with its seemingly contingent events? What do Epicurus, Stoicism, Boethius and Gassendi have to say?
3. Determinism or Contingency? If God is omnipotent, is there still room for contingency? Is what we consider 'random' just a sign of ignorance? And does God have to follow his own laws? Hobbes, Spinoza and the correspondence between Leibniz and Clarke shed light on these questions.
4. Coincidence or Intelligent Design? The bodies of humans and animals seem to work very purposefully. Are they not then proof of the existence of an intelligent creator? But what if we explain these same bodies from an evolutionary perspective? And if we suppose that chance might even be involved in the origin of variation? Hume, Paley, Darwin and modern genetics address these questions.
5. Chance: Chance' and 'randomness' are neighbouring words. In English they are identical: 'chance'. But if we try to describe chance by means of probability theory, doesn't order suddenly emerge from randomness? Is it possible that the world is chaotic at the micro level, but ordered at a higher level? Laplace, Poincaré, determinism and probabilism approach randomness in this mathematical context.
6. An open view: For centuries, physicists favoured a deterministic view of the world. But the 20th century saw major cracks in this worldview: the radioactive decay of an atom seems unpredictable and, more generally, quantum mechanics seems to rule out determinism. Has chance returned to physics, or are other interpretations possible? Bohr, Schrödinger and Heisenberg show a twentieth century approach to the role of chance in physics. And now, in the twenty-first century, this course on chance has an 'open-ended' approach.

Teachers

Dr. Frederik Bakker is associate professor of History of Philosophy at uu77. He conducts research in the field of ancient philosophy, in particular Epicurean physics and epistemology and their reception in modern times.

Prof. dr. Christoph Lüthy is Professor of History of Philosophy and Science at uu77. He is interested in the origins of modern sciences since the Renaissance, in the development of theories of matter and time, the imagination of scientific knowledge, and the mind-body problem in the context of Darwin's theory of evolution.

Prof. dr. Carla Rita Palmerino is professor of History of Philosophy at uu77. Her research focuses on early modern science and philosophy, and in particular on the metaphysical and epistemological foundations of natural philosophy.

Dr. Marij van Strien  is associate professor of History of Philosophy at uu77. Her research focuses on the history and philosophy of the natural sciences, in particular physics.