Barretts Net

Chance, a concept with which anyone who takes part in lotteries engages with continuously, first appeared in philosophy under the Greeks. Leucippus first discussed the notion of chance when describing atomism; “The cosmos, then, became like a spherical form in this way: the atoms being submitted to a casual and unpredictable movement, quickly and incessantly”.

Many of the early Greek philosophers did not believe that chance existed yet for Aristotle, luck (tyche) and chance (automaton) were everyday phenomena. Yet Aristotle’s concept of chance was rather complex. He did not believe that chance events were uncaused, he saw them as the result of the concurrence of two causal events. For example, a falling stone that happens to hit a tree is indeed a chance event. Yet the growing of the tree and the falling of the stone were determined events, not chance ones. Aristotle differentiated between two forms of chance; luck and chance. Tyche (luck), is a phenomenon that operates in the human mind at the will of the gods whilst Automaton (chance) is a phenomenon that operates in the realm of nature.