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In logic, contingency is the feature of a statement making it neither necessary nor impossible. [1] [2] Contingency is a fundamental concept of modal logic. Modal logic concerns the manner, or mode, in which statements are true. Contingency is one of three basic modes alongside necessity and possibility.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a 1989 book by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, based on two sets of lectures he gave at University College, London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge.
Richard McKay Rorty (October 4, 1931 – June 8, 2007) was an American philosopher and historian of ideas.Educated at the University of Chicago and Yale University, Rorty's academic career included appointments as the Stuart Professor of Philosophy at Princeton University, the Kenan Professor of Humanities at the University of Virginia, and as a professor of comparative literature at Stanford ...
Future contingent propositions (or simply, future contingents) are statements about states of affairs in the future that are contingent: neither necessarily true nor necessarily false. The problem of future contingents seems to have been first discussed by Aristotle in chapter 9 of his On Interpretation ( De Interpretatione ), using the famous ...
In the philosophy of religion, a cosmological argument is an argument for the existence of God based upon observational and factual statements concerning the universe (or some general category of its natural contents) typically in the context of causation, change, contingency or finitude.
Professor of medieval philosophy Jon McGinnis said that the argument requires only a few premises, namely, the distinction between the necessary and the contingent, that "something exists", and that a set subsists through their members (an assumption McGinnis said to be "almost true by definition").
Philosopher Brian Leftow has argued that the question cannot have a causal explanation (as any cause must itself have a cause) or a contingent explanation (as the factors giving the contingency must pre-exist), and that if there is an answer, it must be something that exists necessarily (i.e., something that just exists, rather than is caused ...
All religions, nearly all philosophies, and even a part of science testify to the unwearying, heroic effort of mankind desperately denying its own contingency" (Monod, 44). It is this contingency of human existence that is the central message of Chance and Necessity, that life arose by chance and all beings of life, including humans, are the ...