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The complete final product of Bayesian inference is the posterior distribution of the quantity of interest. Important inference summaries include point estimation, region estimation and precise hypotheses testing. Those summaries may appropriately be described as the solution to specific decision problems which depend on the particular loss function chosen. The use of a continuous loss function leads to an integrated set of solutions where the same prior distribution may be used throughout. Objective Bayesian methods are those which use a prior distribution which only depends on the assumed model and the quantity of interest. As a consequence, objective Bayesian methods produce results which only depend on the assumed model and the data obtained. The combined use of intrinsic discrepancy, an invariant information‐based loss function, and appropriately defined reference priors, provides an integrated objective Bayesian solution to both estimation and hypothesis testing problems. The ideas are illustrated with a large collection of non‐trivial examples.

The second chapter shifts from a general outline of the thesis concerning nature’s extrinsicality in order to substantiate its plausibility. It begins with a reconstruction of the basal categories with which Hegel’s philosophy of nature begins, i.e. space and time. Hegel frames space and time in terms of indeterminacy and externality such that we cannot speak of a distinct unit(y), or internality, of space or time, both features which are crucial to conceptuality and subjectivity. In this special sense, Hegelian nature begins in a void. Space-time displays an utter failure at auto-articulation. The chapter then outlines the duplicitous signification of Hegel’s analysis. It argues that while Hegel’s analysis is fundamentally concerned with conceptual discourse it is not solely concerned with discourse. Consequently, at an ontological level, the striking contingency of Hegelian nature. There is no necessity in advance that this or that thing emerges though definite ones certainly do, e.g. the objects of physics and those of mechanics. Instead, there is a contingent array of objects that thought references and then must, retroactively, construct an account of their necessary interrelations. However, this necessity is one that is posited retroactively and so displays the contingency of thought’s narrative concerning necessity.

Now that we have set the stage for organizations, we can study their dynamics, their formation and decay. A key aspect of such an attempt is to quantify the stability of organizations which can be studied by observing the flows of material/energy/information through the network graphs that make up organizations. So we shall first look at chemical flows and the formalism to describe them. Next is an introduction of examples of organization dynamics. We explain how to observe the formation of organizations and extend the concept of closure and self-maintenance introduced earlier to include probabilistic concepts.

Patrick Sutherland has been taking photographs in the Spiti desert mountain valley, located high in the Himalayas, for nearly 25 years. What was initially envisioned as a one-off photographic field trip has developed into an obsessive, long-term, documentary project that is continually shaped by the challenging and complex relationships he has developed with the local communities who live there. As Sutherland notes “The practice of documentary photography is rarely straightforward. It is seldom about mechanically recording the world” but is a process in which images emerge from uncontrolled, unpredictable and random encounters, and necessitates a collusion with the contingencies—as well as structures—of social life, social relations and the surrounding environment. Embracing photo elicitation and collaborative formal portraiture, Sutherland observes that each time he returns to the Spiti Valley his understanding of the landscape and the people who live there shifts slightly, as does the meaning and narrative structure of the archive.

This chapter introduces the reader to contingency headhunting. The headhunters who work on a contingency basis earn their commissions only if they make placements. They and their work remain largely overlooked in studies of labor-market intermediaries – third-party agents who match workers and jobs – although they perform the bulk of the recruiting in the U.S. The chapter argues that an analysis of headhunters has broader value and relevance for academics, companies, and job candidates because it sheds light on how job candidates are identified, recruited, and hired. The chapter introduces the key issues for the book: the role cultural matching plays in hiring, why employers find it advantageous to use headhunters, and how new technologies and economic downturns have affected search and hiring.

This chapter argues that although Quentin Meillassoux’s philosophy has been received as a scientistic realism, its fundamental commitments are shaped by political opposition to Hegelian historicism. By drawing on published fragments of his long-awaited book, The Divine Inexistence, the chapter shows that it is Meillassoux’s rejection of the historical symbol of modernity and its collective politics that leads him to propose replacing it with an individual, ethical orientation guided by speculative philosophy. Read in the context of this wider body of work, Meillassoux’s After Finitude realises the authoritative trajectory set in motion by Althusser and Badiou.

This chapter begins by taking stock of the first two parts of the book. It argues that although classical Marxism cannot think events discontinuously, its science of history can at least be subjected to empirical verification. By contrast, while post-Althusserian theory succeeds in thinking events radically it does so on the basis of a self-referential rationalism that grants authority to theorists and is resistant to empirical control. To go beyond these philosophical traditions, the afterword suggests that complexity theory and ‘weak’ notions of emergence provide a way forward. Agent-based modelling of complex social systems offers a mediation of necessity and contingency that could help orient political strategy.

The fourth chapter shows how the earlier established definition of modern sovereignty – as the justification of the end of power through the means of violence – influences the development of the idea of popular sovereignty. Spinoza's theory of resistance is shown to be the first time that the idea of the sovereign justification of violence is criticized by suggesting a theory of democracy. Kleist's Michael Kohlhaas further indicates that a direct opposition to sovereignty power can only increase the power of justification, and hence that different strategies need to be employed for a radical politics.

Modalities for Buridan are mainly the alethic modes, ‘necessary’, ‘possible’, ‘impossible’ and ‘contingent’. First, Buridan makes clear that a proposition is said to be of necessity or of possiblity, not because it is necessary or possible, but on account of the mode that occurs in it. He divides modal propositions into the composite, where the mode is predicated of the dictum, and the divided, where the mode divides the predicate from the subject. He describes the ampliation of the supposition of terms in divided modal propositions. He sets out in detail the equivalences between the modes before embarking a set of Conclusions, first about divided modals, then about composite modals. In the former, he restricts himself to those with an affirmed mode, since those with a negated mode can be converted by interchanging ‘not necessary’ with ‘possibly not’ and ‘not possible’ with ‘necessarily not’. He observes that ‘contingently’ and ‘contingently not’ are equivalent. Finally, he discusses inferences between composite and divided modals.

The final book is the most ambitious of all, giving an entirely novel account modal syllogisms, not tied to Aristotle’s account at all. He passes quickly over syllogisms with composite modals, including epistemic modals, and proceeds to general conclusions about syllogisms with divided modals, mixing all the different modes, ‘necessary’, ‘possible’ together with non-modal propositions, using the dictum de omni et nullo, reductio per impossibile and the expository syllogism to show validity. He also notes when conclusions do not follow syllogistically. He considers syllogisms with divided modal propositions of contingency and of non-contingency, a negated mode which he notes cannot be reduced to an affirmed one. Finally, he treats syllogisms between reduplicative propositions, that is, ‘qua’-propositions which have a four-fold exposition.

Pierre Aubenque’s “Science Regained” (1962; translated by Clayton Shoppa) was originally published as the concluding chapter of Le Problème de l’Être chez Aristote, one of the most important and original books on Aristotle’s Metaphysics. In this essay, Aubenque contends that the impasses which beset the project of first philosophy paradoxically become its greatest accomplishments. Although science stabilizes motion and thereby introduces necessity into human cognition, human thought always occurs amidst an inescapable movement of change and contingency. Aristotle’s ontology, as a discourse that strives to achieve being in its unity, succeeds by means of the failure of the structure of its own approach: the search of philosophy – dialectic – becomes the philosophy of the search. Aubenque traces this same structure of scission, mediation, and recovery across Aristotelian discussions of theology, motion, time, imitation, and human activity.

Gert-Jan van der Heiden’s “Contingency and Skepticism in Agamben’s Thought” articulates an encounter between Sextus Empiricus and Giorgio Agamben. Contrary to the usual epistemological reading of ancient skepticism, van der Heiden points out the ontological import of skeptical problems. Van der Heiden focuses especially on how skeptical and quasi-skeptical terms (such as ἐποχή‎ and οὐ μᾶλλον‎, the Platonic εὐπορία‎, and the Pauline καταργεῖν‎) underlie Agamben’s ontology of contingency and potentiality. Thus van der Heiden uncovers a peculiar potentiality of the skeptic. The skeptic has the power to withhold assent, to refuse to affirm or to deny any particular belief; this is the habit of skeptical thinking itself, a power that is not subordinated to any sort of actuality.

Boutroux, approximately 150 years prior to Meillassoux, already argued for the contingency of laws of nature, as well as truths of logic and mathematics. Boutroux, however, does not espouse factiality, namely, the necessity of contingent beings, but he rather offers a veritable ontology of the fact. Boutroux does not abandon necessity, but he does show how all necessity is itself consequent, that is, a matter of fact. He does this by arguing for the laws of nature as nothing but the habit of nature, which springs not from chance but from spontaneity. Being bottoms out in pontaneity rather than in simple randomness.

As a direct result of the state of minority government, both main parties in 1970s Britain, contrary to popular perceptions, conducted extensive planning for an election being called across a range of different dates. This chapter reveals the evolving strategic dialogues through internal papers, including Callaghan ordering the preparation of contingency plans from 1977 onwards, in the event of an unexpected major legislative defeat and forced election. At the same time, it examines the wide-ranging efforts by the Conservatives to anticipate and plan for possible election dates. The chapter also addresses, in depth, the subject of electoral timing, which has generally been confined to brief discussions within overarching political histories or concise references in works on election campaigns.

This chapter addresses the question of intersectionality and the positioning of older people at points in a complex set of locations structured and leant upon by multiple sources of difference and inequality. It argues that social locations are no longer organised through simple binary divisions underpinned by single hierarchies of power and influence. Instead, identities and inequalities are located in the interstices that social divisions and differences form. The positioning both of age and of able-bodiedness, class, ethnicity, gender is rendered contingent by this intersectionality, making each of these potential divisions the source of at most a limited set of demi-regularities that constrain both the political claims of different social groups and the restrict the commonalities of different communities. The chapter concludes that intersectionality, though a much-contested concept, does draw attention to the social positioning of and social divisions within later life.

This final chapter opens by taking note of a set of important existing ontological accounts and associated position-labels that are closely related to what I am calling “contingentism.” These are each distinct with respect to their history, usage, and claims, and none of them overlaps exactly with the features of contingentism; but they do share a commitment to emphasizing the mutual dependence of ontological categories, thereby not taking for granted their independence. As I point out here, by drawing attention to this common thread of mutual dependence, contingentism permits us to see its relative simplicity. To put it very simply: Yes, everything does depend. And by everything, we contingentists mean everything, without remainder. The technical elegance of this formulation may render this important component of each of the aforementioned positions more readily intelligible. At the same time, “contingentism” suggests the natural alliance of these ontological positions with the biological sciences, in which several concepts of interdependence and contingency are already in circulation. Finally, I suggest that the world as seen from a contingentist perspective is simultaneously a perfectly ordinary and truly wondrous world, for it does not demand a separation of the mysterious from the material.

The chapter considers two ways of conceptualizing the events of the Arab uprisings. These transformations can be explained by actor-centric narratives stressing the contingency of protest episodes and of their outcomes. They can also be portrayed as the unfolding of longer-term trends in which specific combinations of economic, military, social and political factors repeatedly shape the form and outcomes of change. The chapter highlights the importance of meaning-making in the construction of the causality of the 2011 uprisings in North Africa. It points to the centrality of interpretation in explanations of the trajectories of change both in countries that have witnessed dramatic political transformations (Tunisia, Libya) and in countries having experienced only mild institutional reform (Algeria, Morocco).

In the four North African countries, the early process of mobilization in protest events illustrated the contingent dynamics of events-generated events. The transformation of localized episodes of unrest into nationwide waves of unrest was not only the product of the strategic and coincidental actions of the protesters but also of the responses of the authoritarian systems in place. The different trajectories of change in the four polities can be used as counterfactuals to map varied scenarios of interactions between multiple players and to draw inferences. They illustrate how the variations in the sequencing of events, formation of arenas of contestation and construction of actors and practices shaped differently the outcomes of the uprisings in each state. Rather than stressing how these transformations are likely outcomes of pre-existing structural trends and tensions, an event-oriented account of the Arab uprisings illustrates instead how contingent these institutional re-articulations were.