CASE. - Those rare events are attributed to chance which, although unforeseen and unforeseeable, nevertheless display a certain finalistic value in their outcome. It is the "combination," the encounter or coincidence (objective element), curious because "interesting" (subjective element): the peasant who, while hoeing, finds a hidden treasure; the thirsty man who is killed by brigands lying in wait near the spring, etc.
In classical mechanism (Anaxagoras, the atomists, Empedocles, the Stoics, the Epicureans, Strato of Lampsacus) chance is a mere name put forward to cover man's ignorance of causes: in nature and in human life everything proceeds with rigorous necessity, which is explained differently in the different systems (cf. Alexander of Aphrodisias, De fato, ch. II, ed. I. Bruns, Berlin 1892).
Related on one side to the classical conception is the modern conception of chance events, which rests on "statistical laws" or the law of large numbers. It is established that in microphysics, in microbiology, in astrophysics, and in social facts, while the single event seems at the mercy of chance, the "collective phenomena" can instead be predicted, and with all the greater precision the larger the number of elements one is working with. Nevertheless it is generally agreed (E. Borel) that this concerns purely the effects of calculation and leaves intact the question of the nature of becoming, unlike ancient fatalism or immanentism (A. Tilgher).
Aristotle introduces the theory of chance as an integration of the four causes (Phys., II, 4-6, 195 b 31 ff.; Metaph., VI, 7, 1032 a 27 and 9, 1034 b 9) because it is often confused with them, although in reality it expresses the absence of causes. For while natural events take place through the action of the form of an agent to which they correspond and from which they derive "of necessity and always" if the nature of the cause is necessary, or "almost always" if the cause is defeasible and contingent, chance on the other hand is predicated of what happens "per accidens," of what with respect to proximate causes displays no law: under this vague denomination the most disparate facts can be indicated, from simple combinations and insignificant "fortuitous" events, to the deviations of physical laws (births of monsters and the like) in the material world, to the combinations or accidents of properly human life that have changed the face of the world (Caesar's "alea iacta est" and the sending of Lenin to Russia in the sealed train...). Aristotle distinguishes simple chance (αὐτόματον) from good and bad fortune (τύχη, ἀτύχη), in which its repercussion in man's benefit or harm is considered, without pronouncing on whether they depend in some way on the First Cause. In Christian creationism, on the other hand, both because of the omnipotence of divine causality and because of the vastness of consequences that these facts often display, they are attributed in a special way to God, whose providence establishes, unfolds and embraces from on high the history of individuals as well as of nations, with a single glance (Sum. Theol., Iª, q. 115, a. 6; q. 116, a. 1; In Periherm., I, lect. 14). V. DETERMINISM; STATISTICAL LAWS; PROBABILITY.
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Cornelio Fabro