The present book concentrates on how the conspiratorial mindset handles the phenomenon of contingency. Contingency can appear everywhere: in science, art, politics, religion, and everyday life. As mentioned, conspiracists tend to search for necessities and are reluctant to attribute certain events to chance. Everything happens for a necessary reason. So, what is contingency? When seen in isolation and abstractly, contingency is a logical and philosophical concept; however, even as an abstract concept, it has various shades of meaning, some of which need to be clarified first. Most basically, when what happens is neither necessary nor impossible, we speak of coincidence or of contingency. Sometimes the coincidence’s causes are known, sometimes they remain unknown. The Oxford English Dictionary defines “contingent” as “of uncertain occurrence; liable to happen or not; happening by chance; fortuitous; conditional; not predetermined by necessity […]” (Stevenson 2007). The coincidence is thus the event, and contingency is the concept trying to grasp the fortuity or the “coincidentality” of the event. In German, the coincidence is characteristically called Zufall, which means that an event unexpectedly “falls” into an environment and potentially determines other events. “Coincidence” expresses here the scholastic accidere, which means “to occur” (which is vorfallen in German) and which obviously gave its name to the accident. In Greek, the coincidence is endechomenon or symbebekos. Aristotle speaks in his natural scientific works (for example Physics, Β 6: 197 b 32–35) as well as in his logical treatises (for example Prior Analytics 46b–47b) and Metaphysics (for example 1025a) of the “kata symbebekos” (chance event),1 which subsequent generations of philosophers saw as an undetermined cause in the sense of the accidens. Scholasticism applied the symbebekos to language by seeing it as that which is not necessarily present in language, but which occurs unnecessarily and is thus accidental (see Mauthner 2012: 61). Aristotle applies the word endechomenon in various slightly differing ways, but most often it is that which is “neither necessary nor impossible” (On Interpretation, 25a37–41, 29b29–32, 32al8–29, 33b17, 22–23). “Contingent” as the modern translation of endechomenon has thus become common.

In modern thought, contingency and coincidence are commonly used interchangeably, a convention that was most probably introduced by Kant. In The Critique of Pure Reason (1974: 119), Kant uses the words “das Zufällige” (and not der Zufall) for what Leibniz, in his Theodicy, had called Kontingenz (I, §39).