Book/Printed Material The Challenge of Chance : A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities

Title

• The Challenge of Chance : A Multidisciplinary Approach from Science and the Humanities

Summary

• This book presents a multidisciplinary perspective on chance, with contributions from distinguished researchers in the areas of biology, cognitive neuroscience, economics, genetics, general history, law, linguistics, logic, mathematical physics, statistics, theology and philosophy. The individual chapters are bound together by a general introduction followed by an opening chapter that surveys 2500 years of linguistic, philosophical, and scientific reflections on chance, coincidence, fortune, randomness, luck and related concepts. A main conclusion that can be drawn is that, even after all this time, we still cannot be sure whether chance is a truly fundamental and irreducible phenomenon, in that certain events are simply uncaused and could have been otherwise, or whether it is always simply a reflection of our ignorance. Other challenges that emerge from this book include a better understanding of the contextuality and perspectival character of chance (including its scale-dependence), and the curious fact that, throughout history (including contemporary science), chance has been used both as an explanation and as a hallmark of the absence of explanation. As such, this book challenges the reader to think about chance in a new way and to come to grips with this endlessly fascinating phenomenon.

Names

• Landsman, Klaas. editor.
• van Wolde, Ellen. editor.

Created / Published

• Cham : Springer International Publishing : Imprint: Springer, 2016.

Contents

• Introduction (K. Landsman, E. van Wolde, N. ter Berg) -- Conceptual and Historical Reflections on Chance (C. Lüthy, C. R. Palmerino) -- The Mathematical Foundations of Randomness (S. A. Terwijn) -- Randomness and the Madness of Crowds (U. Weitzel, S. Rosenkranz) -- Randomness and the Games of Science (J. J. Goeman) -- The Fine-Tuning Argument: Exploring the Improbability of our Existence (K. Landsman) -- Views on Chance in the Hebrew Bible: Job and Genesis 1 (E. van Wolde).- Happiness and Invulnerability from Chance: Western and Eastern Perspectives (J.M.M.H. Thijssen, D. R. Loy).- The Experience of Coincidence: an Integrated Psychological and Neurocognitive Perspective (M. van Elk, K. Friston, H. Bekkering).- When Chance Strikes: Random Mutational Events as a Cause of Birth Defects and Cancer (H. G. Brunner).- Chance, Variation and the Nature of Causality in Ecological Communities (H. de Kroon, E. Jongejans).- The Size of History: Coincidence, Counterfactuality and Questions of Scale in History (O. Hekster).- Accidental Harm under (Roman) Civil Law (C. Jansen).- Taming Chaos: Chance and Variability in the Language Sciences (R. van Hout, Pieter Muysken) -- and nbsp;Biographies.

Headings

• -  Cognitive psychology
• -  Epistemology
• -  Human genetics
• -  Philosophy and science
• -  Physics
• -  Probabilities
• -  Philosophy of Science
• -  Cognitive Psychology
• -  History and Philosophical Foundations of Physics
• -  Human Genetics
• -  Probability Theory and Stochastic Processes

Notes

• -  Description based on publisher-supplied MARC data.
• -  Philosophy and Religion (R0) (SpringerNature-43725)
• -  Religion and Philosophy (SpringerNature-41175)

Medium

• 1 online resource (VII, 276 pages 7 illustrations, 2 illustrations in color.)

Digital Id

• https://hdl.loc.gov/loc.gdc/gdcebookspublic.2019739443

Library of Congress Control Number

• 2019739443

Rights Advisory

• Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International CC BY-NC 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/legalcode External

Access Advisory

• Unrestricted online access.
• Open Access

Online Format

• image
• epub

LCCN Permalink

• https://lccn.loc.gov/2019739443

Additional Metadata Formats

• MARCXML Record
• MODS Record
• Dublin Core Record