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The thesis of this essay is that there is a primordial apprehension of the contingency of nature in civilized experience.¹ The expressions of this apprehension of contingency have taken many forms, from the mythic to the philosophical and theological. The expressions have different motifs in different cultures, and there is no preferred cultural starting point. My intent here is to explore the truth about this apprehension of contigency, however, and so I shall be arguing for a preferable contemporary way of understanding it, framed in the discourse of Western intellectual traditions as informed by the East and South Asian. In particular, I shall argue that there are two dimensions to the contingency of nature, namely the contingency of natural things within nature, and the contingency of nature as such, and that the apprehension of both is one of the founding definitions of human culture. The first can be called cosmological contingency, characteristic of cosmological processes, and the second ontological contingency, the contingency of being as such, from ontos, one of the Greek words for being. These two senses of contingency are closely related. From a cross-cultural perspective, the notions of both nature and its apprehension are problematic, and some of the discussion to follow treats these problems.

DOI: 10.1007/978-94-017-2614-6_9

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