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Historical Contingency
Author(s) -
BenMenahem Yemima
Publication year - 1997
Publication title -
ratio
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.475
H-Index - 29
eISSN - 1467-9329
pISSN - 0034-0006
DOI - 10.1111/1467-9329.00032
Subject(s) - contingency , epistemology , context (archaeology) , conflation , action (physics) , teleology , causality (physics) , bracketing (phenomenology) , sanctions , philosophy , political science , law , history , physics , archaeology , quantum mechanics
The paper provides a new characterization of the concepts of necessity and contingency as they should be used in the historical context. The idea is that contingency (necessity) increases in direct (reverse) proportion to sensitivity to initial conditions. The merits of this suggestion are that it avoids the conflation of causality and necessity (or contingency and chance), that it enables the bracketing of the problem of free will while maintaining the concept of human action making a difference, that it sanctions tendencies without recourse to teleology, and that it recasts the controversy between historicists and anti‐historicists in less dogmatic language.