If the results of a study reveal an interesting association between an exposure and a health outcome, there is a natural tendency to assume that it is real. (Note: we are considering whether two things are associated. This does not imply that one causes the other to occur.) However, before we can even contemplate this possibility we have to try to rule out other possible explanations for the results. There are three main ‘alternative explanations’ that we have to consider whenever we analyse epidemiological data or read the reports of others, whatever the study design; namely, could the results be due to chance, bias or error, or confounding? We discuss the first of these, chance, in this chapter and cover bias and confounding in Chapters 7 and 8, respectively.

The Coda sketches how the distinctive tradition of uncertainty in nineteenth-century literature and culture changes with the rise of literary modernism. Uncertainty remains of vital interest to writers like Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and E. M. Forster. Yet a more self-conscious embrace of chance, contingency, and randomness, alongside a more thoroughgoing skepticism, disengages this writing from the earlier literature’s concerns. Further valences acquired by the concept of uncertainty in the early twentieth century – as radical indeterminacy in physics and contrast class to risk in economics – both intensify cultural interest in the topic and disarticulate its nineteenth-century framework. In a reading of Joseph Conrad’s novel Chance (1914), I argue that his emphasis on the value of momentary judgments, on knowledge as mercurial and provisional, and on the role of accident in literary plots all reprise Victorian tactics.

Modern theorists have seen the development of the concept of risk as reflecting a profound shift away from a belief in the divine determination of human fate. Modernity, it is also argued, has seen the introduction of new mega-risks, which are far larger than those before. The chapter challenges these views and argues both that the Romans were not simply fatalistic about the future, and also that it is impossible to quantify whether the ancients faced less risk.

General conclusion summarizes the entire project, restating its principal objectives and achievements. (1) It emphasizes that evolution does not oppose or contradict the classical Aristotelian-Thomistic philosophical and theological view of reality. (2) It stresses the importance of the constructive proposal of metaphysics of evolutionary transitions, which takes into account the interplay of chance and teleological order in speciation. (3) It refers to the importance of the distinction between creation and divine governance of the universe, where the evolutionary origin of the new living beings belongs to the latter category and not to the former. (4) Finally, it emphasizes the relevance of Aquinass view of divine action as applied to the notion of divine concurrence in evolutionary transitions. All these aspects contribute to the contemporary Aristotelian-Thomistic model of theistic evolution developed in the volume. The research presented in it proves that, despite a certain dose of skepticism toward classical philosophy and theology, the longstanding legacy of the Aristotelian-Thomistic tradition remains vigorous and ready to enter a vivid and fruitful conversation with contemporary philosophy and science.

Chapter three engages in the investigation of the meaning and role of natural selection, teleology and chance in evolutionary processes. From Aristotle and Aquinas, through Darwin and the twentieth-century evolutionary synthesis, to the most current philosophy of evolutionary biology, the fate of the notion of goal-directedness is traced and it is defended as indispensable and intrinsically related to chance in processes that affect the fittingness of organisms, which is tested by natural selection.

Uncertainty is a part of everyday life. We live with a range of situations that inherently have an element of uncertainty in them – for example, crossing the road, going on holiday, or making a major purchase – but we often ignore the embedded chance in these activities. Risk is acknowledged in many activities, and much effort is expended in identifying these risks and minimising any potential negative outcomes. In schools, for example, a risk assessment is required prior to any excursion with children. Probability is the strand of mathematics that addresses uncertainty. This chapter explores ideas relating to probability in the mathematics classroom.

The casino provided a unique location to probe the logic of chance for those seeking to understand fortune and misfortune, causation and correlation. Chance helped generate predictability. When we shift to consider the picture of luck that emerges, we see that it is exhibited in various systems designed to generate wins at the gambling table, lured to a person to through any number of bizarre superstitions, and made the object of social scientific inquiry. Luck was something that people could generate, manufacture, cultivate, or capture. This element of human agency speaks to a vision of the world that promoted the basic idea of human agency while also acknowledging its limits. Gambling systems and superstitions, especially when they did not rest on the foundation of the “maturity of chances,” were at their heart modern attempts to bend luck to one’s side.

The introduction sets out the intent of the book, an overview of the major works in the field, and a view of the arguments appearing in each chapter. Gambling is central to the cultural, social, and intellectual history of the nineteenth century. Studying casino gambling provides a way to see how nineteenth-century Europeans understood their changing world, even as it also reflected those changes itself. In this way gambling was used in an explanatory capacity, one that let contemporaries probe the inner workings of the machine and the creation of knowledge. If we want to understand the intricate dance of society, culture, politics, and ideas, then gambling is a useful tool to pry open these different stories, allowing us to see better large historical transformations.

In this chapter, I present Aristotle’s arguments in his books on Physics defending the claim that there is purposiveness in nature independent of thinking, foresight and deliberation. Hegel’s arguments for objective purposiveness are correctly understood only in light of those of Aristotle. In fact, I argue that the sense in which teleology is for Hegel the truth of mechanism (and, ultimately, of causality) is the sense in which, for Aristotle, final causes are the cause of ‘that which comes to be by nature’ and the cause of other kinds of causes (matter, efficient causes and even form) being where they are and having the effects that they eventually have. The chapter revises Aristotle’s understanding of this connection.

Randomization solves the problem of confounding bias; it addresses systematic error, which is the most important source of error, not chance. It equalizes all potential confounding factors, known and unknown, in all groups so that they equally influence the results, and thus can be ignored. Only then can the results of randomized treatment be interpreted at face value and causal inferences made. Sample size and other factors are relevant, though, and small randomized clinical trials (RCTs) can be misleading. Examples are given.

The two major sources of error are chance (random error) and confounding bias (systematic error). After correcting for these two kinds of error, one can then assess or assert causation. These are the “Three Cs.”

The coincidence between the events on 9/11 in Santiago in 1973 and New York in 2001, earlier observed by Ariel Dorfman, lends itself to an analysis of the spiral of Bolaño’s oeuvre from the trauma of the 1970s Chilean dictatorship to the neo-globalizing moment that overlapped with the world dissemination of Bolaño’s work. Bolaño is nostalgic for the Allende era in Chile when meaningful social change seemed possible. Yet he is conscious that it was the authoritarian force and neoliberal economics of the Pinochet regime that was truly prophetic of the future. The nostalgic and the counterfactual, the elegiac and recursive, intertwine as Bolaño looks back on his generation’s odyssey and sees analogies for its trauma in the femicides of 2666. A nodal point of this intertwining is the tenth anniversary of the coup on September 11, 1983, where a group of “masochistic Chileans” meet in Paris in The Savage Detectives, poised between a past they never knew and a future they can scarcely envision. Bolaño knows he has to face the necropolitics of the then-present and not the nostalgia of the deferred past; yet the dream of the Allende era is never entirely renounced in his oeuvre.

In his Eleutheriology or On Freedom and Necessity (1788), Ulrich is concerned with the prospect of the concept of transcendental freedom carving out conceptual space between necessity and chance. He notes the ingenuity of Kant’s restriction of natural necessity to appearances and his attempt to locate freedom in a sphere independent of temporal conditions. However, the denial of natural necessity to things in themselves does not entail that the intelligible character is not necessarily determined in a way independent of temporal conditions. Ulrich presses this issue with respect to those instances in which pure reason does not effectively determine the will, i.e. with respect to immoral action. He asserts that there either is a ground sufficient for the exercise or omission of reason’s efficacy, or not. If there is such a ground, then reason is necessarily determined and Kant is ultimately a determinist even with respect to the intelligible character. If there is not, then whether we act morally or immorally is the result of chance, which is irrational.

This chapter seeks to establish who adventured in the lottery, on what sorts of scale, and how regularly. It moves beyond purely impressionistic comment and evidence, and goes in search of systematic records for participation in the official lotteries. It underlines the sheer social and geographical extent of participation in the lottery, which developed first and most intensively in London and its environs, but which quickly spread far beyond the capital and its extensive shadow. The second half examines the motivations of those who undertook lottery adventures, focusing on attitudes towards ‘fortune’ or luck, and the extent to which the lottery served to exemplify and amplify the social solvent which was money, but also engage very widely entertained hopes for independence and social mobility present in British society in this period. Men, women, and children, from all social backgrounds, were susceptible to the allure of the lottery and the possibility of winning one of the capital prizes in the draw, even if some among the upper and middling ranks sought to distance themselves from such entrapments at the same time that they entertained them.