Abstract

The machine sculpture “Klamauk” (English: hubbub) by the Swiss artist Jean Tinguely (1925–1991), featured on the cover, looks like a perfect example of a deterministic process, but it also looks as if thrown together “by chance”. This tension between determinism and chance has been of longstanding concern in the sciences and the humanities. And nowhere is this tension stronger than in debates about free will and our place in the world, where determinism seems bound to crowd freedom out of the picture, yet freedom in the absence of some ordered realm of causes seems inconceivable.