Philosophy of Chance. A cosmic fugue with a prelude and a coda

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Part One: The Prelude
Chapter 1. From Antiquity to Pascal and Fermat
1. Gambling in antiquity and afterwards
2. “What happens, does not happen always, perforce, or the most often”
3. From chance to contingency
4. Precursors
5. The geometry of chance
Chapter 2. Small and high stakes
1. Port-Royal Logic
2. Inspirations and content
3. The wager
4. Huygens – how to expect winning?
Chapter 3. Theology versus probability
1. Posthumous work by Jacob Bernoulli
2. God’s omniscience and the law of large numbers
3. Probability
4. Moral disputes
5. Bernoulli and Leibniz. The logic of contingent events
6. Political arithmetics
Chapter 4. Chance and how the world is organised
1. The principle of least action
2. The polemics of an academic
3. How does the Universe work?
4. The case of Samuel König
5. The principle of least action in contemporary physics
6. Is the integral more mysterious than the differential?
7. Chance versus Intelligence
Chapter 5. The taming of chance
1. Why does chance need taming?
2. Random events versus the strategy of creation
3. Experimenting with chance
4. Morality versus probability calculus
5. Theology – science – theology
6. Perspectives
Part Two: The Fugue
Chapter 6. The probabilistic revolution
1. Introduction
2. Probability and astronomy
3. Towards measure theory
4. Statistical mechanics
5. Brownian motion
6. Kolmogorov
7. Interpretations – von Mises
8. Interpretations – de Finetti
9. Probability as measure
10. Probabilistics versus mathematical structuralism
11. After Kolmogorov
Chapter 7. What is chance?
1. Introductory remarks
2. Preliminary defi nitions
3. Subjective sources of probabilities
4. Objective sources of probabilities
5. Instability versus ignorance
6. The strategy of nature
7. Chance and suffi cient reasons
8. Concluding remarks
Chapter 8. Generalised probability calculi
1. Introduction
2. A bit of history
3. A bit of mathematics: some properties of von Neumann algebras
4. Von Neumann’s agenda
5. A bit of probability calculus
6. A noncommutative probability theory
7. Free probability calculus
8. Consequences
Chapter 9. Probability in the structure of the Universe
1. Probability – from applications to theory
2. Measure and probability
3. Interpretations
4. The structure of chance
Part Three: The Coda
Chapter 10. A short history of anti-evolutionary fundamentalism
1. The beginnings of fundamentalism
2. Monkey trials
3. Intelligent Design
4. God or pure chance?
Chapter 11. The Temptation of Manichaeism
1. Previous disputes in new guises
2. Gnostics or ‘those who know’
3. Mathematics against gnosis
4. Is God the Lord of all?
Chapter 12. Ex casu et fortuna
1. Against the pagans
2. How comes evil?
3. Contingency and the free will
4. A meeting in the market
5. St Augustine’s warning
Chapter 13. The God of probabilities
1. The ontology of probability
2. The problem of low probabilities
3. The problem of high probabilities
4. The indifference principle
Chapter 14. One of the strands of cosmic evolution
1. A basket of problems which have attracted insuffi cient attention
2. A sink for disorder
3. The natural history of carbon
4. Dynamical systems
5. The dynamics of life
6. Natural selection
Chapter 15. Intelligent Design or the Mind of God?
1. Two strategies
2. Necessity and chance
3. Should biology arouse metaphysical emotions?
4. The Mind of God
5. The game of chance called life
6. The Great Matrix

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