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Chance

Philosophy
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

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The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

Chance refers to randomness or unpredictability in events. It challenges notions of control and determinism.

Detailed Definition
In philosophy, chance introduces contingency into understanding reality. In poetry, it appears in themes of fate, coincidence, and unpredictability, often reflected in spontaneous or fragmented forms. Poets use chance to capture the unpredictability of life and the openness of meaning.
Example
Example in poetry:
Lucretius's poem "De Rerum Natura" places philosophical chance (the clinamen, or swerve of atoms) at the heart of the cosmos, and contemporary poets influenced by this text treat contingency not as a defect but as the condition of genuine novelty; Mallarmé's "Un Coup de Dés" (A Throw of the Dice) is the foundational poem of chance aesthetics — its famous declaration that "a throw of the dice will never abolish chance" makes chance a philosophical absolute that no human act can overcome; John Cage's influence on experimental poetry introduced aleatory (chance-based) composition as a philosophical practice — using the I Ching or other randomizing procedures to bypass intention and allow chance to constitute the poem; A poet exploring evolution might use chance as a philosophical concept to meditate on the contingency of one's own existence — the specific genetic combinations that produced this particular person, the chance encounters that shaped this particular life; The Dadaists used chance procedures as an aesthetic and philosophical statement — Tristan Tzara's instruction to cut up a newspaper and pull words from a bag was a claim that chance composition was as legitimate as intentional art, and more honest about the role of contingency in all creation; Paul Celan's fragmentary late poems seem to enact chance at the level of syntax and imagery — the broken connections and unexpected collocations suggest a world in which the ordering principles have given way to the pure contingency of suffering
Additional Notes
Chance has a complex philosophical history. Aristotle distinguished between chance (tyche) in human affairs and coincidence (automaton) in nature. Epicurus introduced the clinamen — the spontaneous swerve of atoms — as a source of genuine indeterminacy in the Epicurean cosmos and the basis of free will. In the philosophy of science, the debate between determinism and indeterminism has been transformed by quantum mechanics, which appears to build genuine probabilistic chance into the structure of reality. Peirce's tychism holds that chance is a real and irreducible feature of the universe. For poetry, chance matters aesthetically (aleatory composition, automatic writing) and philosophically (the contingency of existence, the place of the unexpected in a life or a poem). Mallarmé's engagement with chance — the throw of the dice — is the paradigmatic poetic engagement with this philosophical concept. Related terms: contingency, determinism, indeterminism, Epicurean clinamen, tychism, aleatory aesthetics.
Also Known As
Fortuna hap
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