Law and Chance

Emanuele Severino always knew how to ask the most compelling, even frightening questions. If you fear the unlimited power of science, then ask yourself, why shouldn’t power be limitless? What could put a limit to it? Perhaps only a philosophy that challenges the very notions of being and becoming. * Alessandro Carrera, Director in Italian Studies, University of Houston, USA *
Severino’s Law and Chance contains a most lucid presentation of a fundamental aspect of his vast philosophical oeuvre: a continuing confrontation with epistemology and with the theories of contemporary science. Severino highlights the shift between the deterministic paradigm that characterized modern science up to the end of the 19th century and the logic that governed science after Einstein’s relativity and the developments of quantum theory. The possibility of determining the laws of chance constitutes a revolution for the entirety of the contemporary technical-scientific system. However, what does chance mean? Does chance already presuppose an order? What turns an event into an instance of chance, if not its being part of an order? Is there then a law that precedes every law of chance? These are some of the questions that render Severino’s contribution a necessary one. * Massimo Cacciari, author of "The Withholding Power " *