Sketch of an Axiology of Contingency

We start with the following status quo ante: in modern philosophy, the question of contingency has mainly been treated in terms of modal logic, namely possibility, existence (or actuality), and necessity, as well as their opposites, impossibility, non-existence, and contingency. Contrary to necessity, whose judgement is apodictic, contingency means that otherwise is also possible; it doesn’t have to be so, therefore its corresponding judgement is problematic. This form of modal logic, which we find in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason , has been fruitfully studied in analytic philosophy, and more recently we also see it in the revolts against Kant and the legacy of the Kantian epistemology, notably in the work of the French philosopher Quentin Meillassoux. The thinkers of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries sought for certainty as the starting point of knowledge and hoped that given such surety, it would be possible to build an impeccable system of knowledge immune to errors and illusions. For certain philosophers, given such a system, it is possible to determine any necessary future event, for example, Laplace’s infamous demon. Meillassoux attempts to show that contingency has been supressed in those epistemologies that are based on the correlation between subject and object, which is the product of an anthropocentrism. Therefore, it is necessary to affirm the necessity of contingency to open up a more-than-human epistemology, namely an epistemology beyond subject–object correlation, which according to Meillassoux, has fashioned modern European philosophy since Kant.