From Fortuitism to Animism

Abstract

Upstream from the category of chance is a larger philosophical category, concerned with that which comes to take a particular place among a set of values, qualities or forms. It is the fortuitous. When faced with a fortuitous event, we may ask if determinism, chance or intention is behind it. Lévi- Strauss thought that animism was not disdainful of determinism but, on the contrary, that the belief in a generalized determinism would be a prefigured science from this perspective. The philosophy of William James had this novel feature of accepting the links, by a sort of pansychic empathy, between the various fortuities that make the world, an idea which was recently taken up by the sociology of science in an anthropological approach which denounced the modern divide between facts and values. Do we then have the conceptual tools capable of undermining progressive positivism?