“Everything in the universe is the result of chance and necessity "(Democritus).
The deterministic interpretation of causality is found in those ancient philosophical currents that, conceiving the Universe as created by a Logos regulator, deny the existence of case because everything happens "out of necessity", claiming that the case is only "ignorance of causes".
For the Treccani Dictionary of Philosophy, 'case' is a concept that is opposed to that of necessity as an event that occurs outside and independently of the particular set of causes and effects, and as a claim of the abstract freedom in front of the system of the abstract necessity.
In the history of philosophy, this concept has taken on different meanings depending on whether it was intended as a man's inability to know the causes of an event, whereby the 'case' is reduced to an appearance resulting from mere ignorance or as an event that has no objective cause, or is the product of the intersection of different and independent causal series.
Aristotle considered that the world was eternal. In particular, the ‘case’ indicating the contingent, unpredictable and unintended occurrence.
To ignorance is called Anaxagoras, who, believing the universe rational by essence, concluded that the 'case' could not be other than the effect of human ignorance.
Unlike determinism, indeterminism recognizes the existence of the ‘case’ next to the need, seeing cosmic evolution as their alternation with which the case innovates and the need preserves.
The study of deterministic chaos has helped to produce a critical rethinking of the existing dichotomy between determinism and probability, pointing out how in particular situations many natural phenomena, despite being described by deterministic laws, manifest behaviors predictable, possibly in a probabilistic sense only.
A further blow to determinism derived from the discovery of chaos theory in the second half of the twentieth century. With the emergence of the concept of dependence on initial conditions present in the majority of physical phenomena, the classical determinism is necessarily having to be replaced by a conception in which the state of many phenomena in nature can be expressed only in terms of probabilities. This raises the concept of deterministic chaos, so it is still possible to maintain a certain degree of prediction in physical models, but it becomes impossible to turn prediction into certainty.
The discovery of deterministic chaos, as part of the mathematical theory of nonlinear dynamical systems, and the search for its strict definition, have triggered a wide debate also in philosophy. The philosophical discussion goes so far as to the relationship between determinism and free will, to the capacity of the systems with deterministic chaos to amplify perturbations arbitrarily small.
Aristotle in Physics (II, 5, 25 and 196 et seq.) operates a doubling of the case as an objective event occurring in nature and as subjective perception of favor or disfavor (good or bad luck) by the gods. He thinks that if the facts do not have purpose or end is not based on need and therefore are subject to accidental (Ibid, II, 6, 15-20) [3]. But in this case they may be attributable to real or if it occurs in nature, the tautόmaton, or the fortune, the Tyche. While on tautόmaton man can not affect, on the Tyche instead he can, depending also from his "choices".
The deterministic interpretation of causality is found in those ancient philosophical currents, conceiving the universe as created by a Logos, deny the existence of the case because everything happens "out of necessity", claiming that the case is only a "ignorance causes ", as in modern times will support the astronomer Pierre Simon Laplace.
Unlike the determinism, indeterminism recognizes the existence of the case next to necessity, seeing cosmic evolution as their alternation with which the case innovates and the need preserves. .
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