The best idea in Chapter 17 is... that Nietzsche did not infer (or argue for) chance (148), but rather "he experienced it". This suggests that chance, and the taming of it, has less to do with an argument against determinism, and more to do with a new positive and productive way of experiencing, seeing, &c.. But the chapter remained difficult for us at the end of discussion... What could it mean to say that "Necessity and chance are twinned" (148)?
The best idea in Chapter 18 is... that determinism of the twentieth-century micro-physics stripe is an invention of the 1870s (Cassirer)... but that there is another (older) kind of determinism that "excluded statistical law" (152). It is this kind of determinism that the book tracks in its story of "the erosion of determinism".
[There was discussion, albeit tentative, about the taming of chance as emerging positively in its own right producing only as an after-effect the erosion of determinism, rather than the taming of chance as attempting to negate determinism. Rather, statistics leaves the metaphysics of determinism-voluntarism (the question of free will) "outside our province" (Durkheim, quoted on p. 159).]
The best idea in Chapter 19 is... "Nothing is more commonplace than the distinction between fact and value. From the beginning of our language the word 'normal' has been dancing and prancing all over it" (163). The idea of the normal is both descriptive and prescriptive.
[And thus the normal, perhaps, is beyond the debate, or problematic, of determinism and voluntarism.]
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