The seminar’s primary aim is to provide students with a few workable tools to find their way among interlocking notions of chance, contingency, randomness, probability, indetermination, uncertainty, aleatory and stochastic processes, chaos and complexity, etc.

We shall examine two hypotheses, with their not-so-obvious implications: 1°) chance has more to do with space than with time ; 2°) it does not arise from the absence of causes, nor from the incidental encounters of disconnected causal chains, but rather from the working of formal causality, i.e., a type of causality that doesn’t operate in a piecemeal, continuous fashion, but collectively and possibly en masse, following a principle of action at a distance. Such intuitions are not handled easily by our reptilian philosophical brain.

We will need to test them against examples from narratology (the modelling of chance through fiction), science (quantum chance, chaos and nonlinear dynamics), and art (aleatoric music, strategies of chance in contemporary art). Not to mention philosophy: Aristotle’s doctrine of accident and fortune, Bergson’s real indetermination, Bachelard’s temporal dialectics, Deleuze’s rhizomatics, Meillassoux’ contingency… among others.

The seminar take place on July 04th, 11th and 18th.

Seminars will meet twice a day for 90 minutes on their respective Saturdays or Sundays.

These meetings will occur at 3-4:30 pm, Paris time (9-10:30 am New York time) and 7:00-8:30 pm, Paris time (1-2:30 pm New York time).