Curator’s Note: This article introduces Event-Circle Theory, elucidating how human lives are impacted by significant events linked through coherent sequences of antecedents. It identifies five conditions necessary for forming an Event Circle: formation, coherent accumulation, narrowing relevance, focal realization, and consequential continuation. The concept emphasizes that events can have divergent impacts based on their configuration in individual lives. Furthermore, it discusses concepts like Constraint Weaves, identifying how distinct biographical and external histories can converge, and cross-scale transfer, explaining how events in one domain affect another. The theory highlights the complex interrelation of past actions and their consequences without asserting a deterministic view of destiny. This theory was developed and articulated by Liauw Pauw Phing, a philosopher contributing to the body of knowledge with his nuanced perspectives.
A Description of Constraint Weaves, Convergence and Alogical Jolts
An event belongs to destiny the moment it becomes part of a realised life. Destiny does not yet exist so long as it remains merely an instruction demanding that the event take place.
Abstract
This article develops Event-Circle Theory, a philosophical account of how a human life acquires its realised form through consequentially linked chapters. Its central claim is that significant events emerge from bounded configurations of relevant antecedents whose effects persist, combine with partly independent histories and alter later possibilities. An Event Circle is a bounded configuration identified through five conditions: formation, coherent accumulation, narrowing relevance, focal realisation and consequential continuation. Within such a configuration, relevant antecedents accumulate through one or more coherent sequences, the configuration narrows towards a focal event, and the realised event transmits consequences into subsequent configurations. The five-condition form can occur within a biography or, where independently warranted, within institutional, economic or biological processes. Relative to a focal biography, qualifying circles that develop elsewhere function as external Event Circles. The Constraint Weave names the receiving configuration formed by active biographical Event Circles, external Event Circles and external conditions that do not satisfy the five-condition test. Convergence names the relation that holds when previously distinct histories become jointly consequential within a justified temporal and material field. Cross-scale transfer names the process by which the focal realisation of one Event Circle becomes an antecedent within another Event Circle or receiving Constraint Weave at a different analytical scale. The Alogical Jolt remains specifically subject-mediated because local non-derivability is indexed to an antecedent repertoire belonging to an acting subject. The theory also explains differential consequence, whereby the same incoming event can carry different biographical force in different receiving configurations. Event-Circle Theory remains neutral concerning universal determinism and defines destiny as the realised linear form produced as these relations acquire consequence through time.
Keywords
Event-Circle Theory, Constraint Weave, Convergence, cross-scale transfer, Alogical Jolt, human destiny.
1. The Chronicle and Its Chapters
A life reaches memory unevenly. Years that once arrived one morning at a time later gather into regions with their own weather, their own cast of people and their own unfinished business. Childhood settles into an atmosphere of its own. A marriage opens a field of obligation, intimacy and distance that outlives any single day within it. Illness can split a biography into what was possible before diagnosis and what remains possible afterwards. A period of work may eventually be remembered less through its individual days than through the demands that governed them. We encounter our past through stretches, thresholds, continuities and endings.
Event-Circle Theory makes a stronger claim than the mere observation that memory is organised in this way. A chapter of life is defined by the persistence of conditions established within a bounded period and by the consequences those conditions carry into what follows, whether or not the person later tells a story about it.
Psychological and philosophical work on narrative coherence clarifies what is at stake in that claim. Habermas and Bluck describe temporal, biographical, causal and thematic forms of global coherence in the emergence of the life story,[1] while Ricoeur gives philosophical form to the configuration of events through emplotment.[2] These accounts concern the intelligibility of a life as narrated or understood. The theory takes the existence of narrative organisation seriously while locating its primary claim at another level. It asks whether patterned relations among conditions and consequences remain recoverable when later narration is set aside.
Records, correspondence, repeated conduct and independently witnessed consequences can reveal structures that continued to operate whether or not the subject later described them as chapters. An obligation entered into years earlier can restrict choices without ever becoming part of a preferred self-narrative.
The theory therefore adopts a limited realism about biographical structure. What is treated as real is the consequential relation among conditions, choices, exposures and later possibilities. The chapter is a temporal field in which such relations become established strongly enough to persist into a subsequent field.
Life-course research provides a close empirical neighbour. Elder emphasises timing, historical location, linked lives and the enduring effects of earlier conditions.[3] The theory draws on that temporal sensitivity while proposing a different architecture. Its concern lies with the way several sequences can remain active across chapters, become organised into Event Circles and eventually converge with histories that originated outside the subject.
A chapter therefore does not end cleanly when its calendar period ends. A condition established within one period can continue to alter later obligations, resources, exposures and available options. An earlier decision enters a later chapter through the consequences it helped to establish, even when the original circumstances have passed.
This relation yields a governing principle of the theory: what has happened remains present wherever its consequences remain active.
Time itself remains linear. Past conditions can remain active in the present, yet the present does not return to the past. Events become irreversible once realised. New conditions are then carried forward. The circular language introduced later in the theory refers to the organisation of consequential relations, not to a reversal of temporal direction.
Destiny is restricted accordingly. It denotes the realised form of a life as conditions, choices, crossings, contingencies and consequences become actual through time. It does not denote a script concealed in advance of events. Before an occurrence, several continuations may remain accessible with different probabilities and costs. After the occurrence, one continuation has become history.
Necessity and actuality are not synonyms.
A life can become coherent in retrospect without having been inevitable in prospect. That distinction separates Event-Circle Theory from fatalism at the outset.
2. Coherent Sequences and Event Circles
A significant event typically occupies one visible point while carrying a far longer history behind it. Ordinary explanation often stops at whichever condition sits nearest the outcome because proximity is easiest to observe. The theory asks instead which earlier conditions materially shaped the timing, location, exposure, actionable options, probability or consequence of that outcome.
2.1. Coherent Sequence
A coherent sequence is an ordered set of events and conditions in which each included element has a demonstrable bearing upon a later element relevant to the focal event. Mere precedence does not establish coherence. A fact belongs to the sequence only when its removal from the reconstruction would materially alter the explanation of timing, location, exposure, actionable options, probability or consequence. This is referred to below as the relevance criterion.
This rule prevents infinite regress. Every present event possesses an indefinitely large past. Without a criterion of relevance, an analyst could continue tracing causes through family history, institutional history, political history and material history until every occurrence became connected to almost everything. The analysis stops where antecedent facts cease to make a material difference to the structure under examination.
The sequence is therefore bounded by explanatory relevance rather than by arbitrary chronology.
Within a coherent sequence, each realised event holds two temporal positions. It first appears as an outcome of conditions already present and then becomes a condition entering what follows. Once realised, it can alter later options, obligations, exposures and constraints even after the circumstances of its own formation have passed.
2.2. The Algorithmic Analogy
This double position supports a limited comparison with an algorithm. An output at one stage becomes part of the input at a later stage. The comparison concerns succession only. Human life supplies no finite instruction set from which the whole future can be computed. New conditions arrive from other people and systems. Information remains incomplete. Choices continue to occur. Contingencies alter available paths. The same broad antecedent state can admit several later outcomes.
The expression algorithm of fate is used here as a metaphorical description of consequential succession. It carries no technical claim about computability. A realised outcome can become part of the conditions entering a later stage, but the sequence does not thereby become calculable in advance.
Path-dependence research provides one empirical footing for this structure. Pierson shows how timing, sequence, increasing returns and growing costs of reversal can allow earlier developments to exert durable effects upon later alternatives.[4] The theory uses the principle narrowly. A sequence becomes path-dependent when earlier developments progressively alter the accessibility or cost of later options. A past event matters because later arrangements have formed around it, not simply because it occurred earlier.
2.3. The Event Circle
A coherent sequence becomes part of an Event Circle when its conditions belong to a bounded configuration that develops towards a consequential focal event and then transmits consequences into subsequent configurations. The circle is identified through five conditions: formation, coherent accumulation, narrowing relevance, focal realisation and consequential continuation.
The word event denotes an occurrence, whether within a biography or within an institutional, economic or biological process. The theory advances no position in the metaphysics of events and adopts no criterion of event identity.
2.3.1. Formation
Relative to a specified focal event, formation is located at the earliest point at which a condition can be shown to acquire material relevance to the configuration under reconstruction. The initiating condition may be a decision, obligation, relationship, institutional change, financial commitment, biological development, opportunity or external occurrence. It need not appear dramatic at the time. Its theoretical importance lies in the difference it makes to what becomes more likely, less accessible, more costly or more exposed later.
2.3.2. Coherent Accumulation
Further conditions join the circle only when their relation to what follows can be justified. Some arise from prior decisions or processes internal to the configuration. Others arise from interacting people, institutions, systems or material circumstances. The circle acquires structure as these conditions accumulate through coherent sequences.
2.3.3. Narrowing Relevance
As a focal event approaches, several conditions can become increasingly relevant to the same field of possibility. Narrowing occurs when conditions that were previously separate begin to constrain the same consequential interval and their combined relevance to the focal event can be demonstrated. Narrowing relevance concerns the increasing concentration of relevance within a single candidate Event Circle. It does not require independently developed histories. Where independently developed histories become jointly consequential, their relation is analysed separately as Convergence in section 3.2.
2.3.4. Focal Realisation
The focal event is the point at which the accumulated configuration becomes actual in a form that materially changes what follows. It closes the antecedent configuration analytically because the preceding field of possibilities has now produced one realised history. A focal event must be analytically distinguishable from the gradual development that produced it. A process that merely intensifies without yielding an identifiable point of realisation, such as a general decline or worsening condition, does not by itself supply a focal event. A threshold crossing, decision, diagnosis, transaction or other bounded occurrence can serve as focal realisation only when it marks that point.
2.3.5. Consequential Continuation
Closure does not end the process. The focal event immediately becomes capable of entering later circles or other configurations by altering the conditions from which subsequent action, exposure or development proceeds. Consequential continuation is present when that downstream change can be traced rather than merely assumed.
The circle therefore names a loop of consequential dependence rather than a return through time. Conditions accumulate towards a focal event, and the realised event becomes a condition within a subsequent accumulation. The circle closes analytically at focal realisation and opens again through the consequences that proceed from it. Where independently developed histories become jointly consequential at the focal point, their relation must also be analysed as Convergence in the sense specified in section 3.2. Linear time is never reversed. What recurs is the structural relation in which conditions form an event and the realised event enters the conditions of what follows.
A circle can be structurally coherent even when its focal event has no precedent in the history under analysis. Recurrence can strengthen a reconstruction when it is present, but it is not the defining geometry of an Event Circle.
2.4. Domain-General Form and Analytical Position
The five conditions define a structural form rather than a subject matter. A candidate configuration may belong to a biography, an institution, a disease process, an economic sector or another bounded process, but it qualifies as an Event Circle only when formation, coherent accumulation, narrowing relevance, focal realisation and consequential continuation can each be independently justified. A history does not become an Event Circle merely because it has a past. Histories that fail the five-condition test are treated as conditions or context rather than as Event Circles.
Analytical position determines how a qualifying circle is described relative to a focal biography. When the configuration belongs to the focal person’s own life, it is a biographical Event Circle. When a qualifying configuration develops outside that biography and later enters it as a consequential history, it functions relative to that biography as an external Event Circle. Externality concerns analytical position rather than intrinsic kind. The same qualifying configuration can therefore be biographical relative to one focal biography and external relative to another.
Within a biography, several circles can remain active at once. Professional, financial, family and health-related circles can follow different temporal boundaries, develop at different rates and later become consequential to one another. Their beginnings and focal realisations need not coincide.
The resulting biography is polycentric. Its temporal direction remains one-way while its internal organisation contains many circles that accumulate, narrow, close and feed the circles that come after them. The linear path of destiny emerges from that continuing succession rather than from any single governing cause.
3. Constraint Weaves and Convergence
Event Circles never develop in isolation. At any moment, a focal biography contains active biographical Event Circles while also receiving consequences from circles and conditions whose histories developed elsewhere. The Constraint Weave is the relational configuration formed at that point by active biographical Event Circles, external Event Circles and external conditions that do not themselves satisfy the five-condition test.
A weave contains distinguishable strands whose analytical status must be kept clear. One strand may be a biographical Event Circle arising from a professional decision or family obligation. Another may be an external Event Circle arising within an institution, disease process or economic sector. A third may remain an external condition because its history does not satisfy the five-condition test. The subject can influence some strands and has almost no influence over others.
The distinction between an external Event Circle and an external condition is analytically important. An external history does not become part of the subject’s biography merely because it later affects the subject. Its status as external to the focal biography is independent of whether it satisfies the five conditions. When all five conditions can be justified, it enters the receiving Constraint Weave as an external Event Circle. When they cannot, it enters only as an external condition. In either case, its biographical significance begins when it materially alters timing, location, exposure, actionable options, probability or consequence within the focal life.
3.1. Systemic Causation as a Structural Analogy
Safety science provides a useful structural comparison for this problem. Reason distinguishes explanations centred on the individual nearest to failure from system approaches that examine latent conditions and the wider circumstances in which action occurs.[5]Rasmussen shows how decisions made by several actors at different times and organisational locations can combine with work-system pressures to prepare accident conditions and move activity towards boundaries of acceptable performance.[6] Leveson shows how event-chain models can become explanatorily narrow when they rely on arbitrary stopping points, concentrate on proximate events and omit wider organisational and systemic conditions.[7]
A biography is not an engineered control system. The theory therefore uses this literature as an analogy of structure. The relevant similarity concerns the possibility that several partly independent processes can become jointly consequential while no single process provides an adequate explanation of the outcome in isolation.
Explanatory proximity and explanatory completeness are not the same thing. The action nearest to an outcome may be highly relevant and still belong to a wider configuration that shaped its significance.
3.2. Convergence
Within the Constraint Weave, Convergence names a relation. Two or more coherent sequences, Event Circles or external conditions converge when they become jointly relevant to a focal event within a justified temporal and material field, and when their conjunction materially alters timing, location, exposure, actionable options, probability or consequence relative to an analysis that considers them separately.
The histories involved in Convergence need not interact before their consequences enter the same field. They may develop independently for different lengths of time and under different causal conditions. Convergence holds when their effects become jointly relevant to the focal event and their conjunction makes an explanatory difference that none of the histories supplies in isolation.
This point separates Convergence from ordinary interaction. Two elements can coexist without converging. The analyst must identify what each history contributes, when joint relevance begins and what difference the conjunction makes.
An incoming history may therefore possess an independently warranted Event-Circle structure before its consequences enter the focal biography, as specified in section 2.4.
A close structural neighbour is Event System Theory, developed by Morgeson, Mitchell and Liu for the organisational sciences. Their framework explains event salience through novelty, disruption and criticality, and examines how event effects extend across organisational space and time.[8] Event-Circle Theory differs at the level of identification rather than domain. An Event Circle is identified through formation, coherent accumulation, narrowing relevance, focal realisation and consequential continuation rather than through event strength. Convergence concerns independently developing circles or conditions that become jointly consequential within a justified temporal and material field. In biographical analysis, Event-Circle Theory also distinguishes the receiving Constraint Weave and introduces a criterion of subject-mediated local non-derivability, which forms no part of Morgeson, Mitchell and Liu’s definition of event strength through novelty, disruption and criticality. The resemblance lies in the temporal propagation of consequential events and their effects across time. The analytical architectures remain distinct.
3.3. Temporal Scale and the Boundary of Analysis
Temporal scale forms part of the explanation. Some focal events require reconstruction over seconds and minutes. Others require months or years. The relevant interval is determined by the histories that materially alter the focal event. The analyst should neither stop at the final seconds simply because they are visible nor extend the reconstruction indefinitely simply because earlier history exists.
The relevance criterion introduced in section 2.1 also serves as the stopping rule for Convergence. A condition remains in the analysis only while its removal would materially alter the reconstruction of the focal event. This boundary prevents the theory from turning into the claim that everything is connected to everything.
3.4. Circles on a Linear Axis
The chapter, the Event Circle, the Constraint Weave and Convergence perform distinct analytical functions within the same linear chronology. A chapter marks a consequential period in a focal biography, an Event Circle organises a bounded configuration around a focal event, a Constraint Weave describes the receiving configuration, and Convergence names a relation of joint consequence. An Event Circle can span more than one chapter, and several Event Circles can remain active within one chapter.
3.5. Differential Consequence Across Constraint Weaves
Convergence also reveals that the biographical force of an external event is not fixed by the event alone. The same occurrence can enter different Constraint Weaves and alter different combinations of obligations, resources, vulnerabilities and active circles. Shared exposure therefore does not entail shared consequence. The theory treats the downstream force of an event as dependent partly on the configuration into which it enters, while the external event remains the same institutional or material occurrence at its point of origin.
This distinction is especially important when one external process affects many subjects at once. A common institutional decision may be identical at the point of origin while becoming biographically minor, disruptive or catastrophic in different lives. The explanation must therefore trace both the history of the event that arrives and the structure of the life that receives it.
3.6. Cross-Scale Transfer
Within Event-Circle Theory, cross-scale transfer is a stipulative term for the process by which the focal realisation of one Event Circle becomes an antecedent within another Event Circle or receiving Constraint Weave at a different analytical scale. The event retains its place as an outcome within the circle that produced it while acquiring a second position as a condition within what follows. Transfer can occur from an economic process to an institution, from an institution to a biography, from a biological process to a household, or from one biography to another.
Cross-scale transfer can continue through successive analytical scales without implying that any later outcome was predetermined by an earlier one. Section 5.4 reconstructs one such sequence in detail.
4. Local Non-Derivability and Biographical Rupture
Coherent succession alone would describe only the accumulation of patterned consequence. Human conduct introduces the possibility of a local rupture within that continuity. A biographical trajectory may establish a sufficiently coherent antecedent pattern to support reasonable expectations about what the subject is likely to do, yet a subject-mediated action or response can arise for which that preceding pattern provides no adequate predictive ground. When such an occurrence materially redirects what follows, it produces a local break from the pattern that preceded it.
Within Event-Circle Theory, such an occurrence is termed an Alogical Jolt.
The word alogical requires careful restriction here. It does not mean uncaused. It does not imply exemption from physical law. The classification does not establish metaphysical indeterminacy. The term denotes local biographical non-derivability, a relation between a subject-mediated occurrence and the best warranted reconstruction of the subject’s relevant antecedent repertoire.
A hidden cause may exist. An unrecorded disposition may exist. Later evidence may reveal information that makes an apparently surprising action intelligible. The classification is therefore evidential from the start and remains open to revision as new evidence appears.
The jolt criterion does not extend across domains as the Event Circle does. Local non-derivability is measured against an antecedent repertoire, and a repertoire belongs to a subject who acts. Where there is no such subject, the criterion has no application. Institutions, markets and disease processes can therefore instantiate Event Circles when the five conditions are satisfied, but they are not candidates for Alogical Jolts as the term is defined here.
4.1. Three Conditions
An Alogical Jolt occurs when three conditions are jointly satisfied. The occurrence is mediated by the subject, the best warranted reconstruction of the subject’s relevant antecedent repertoire provides no adequate predictive ground for the realised response, and the occurrence materially reroutes what follows. Each condition is necessary, and none is sufficient alone.
4.1.1. Subject Mediation
The occurrence must enter the trajectory through decision, uptake, refusal, intervention, response or action by the subject. External contingency can transform a life without becoming an Alogical Jolt. An external occurrence can participate in a jolt only through the response by which the subject makes that occurrence biographically active.
4.1.2. Local Non-Derivability
The condition of local non-derivability is satisfied when the best warranted reconstruction of the subject’s relevant antecedent repertoire provides no adequate predictive ground for the realised response. The relevant antecedent repertoire comprises the biographical pattern available before the occurrence, including, where evidence permits, behavioural precedent, durable commitments, professed values, learned skills, known dispositions, repeated habits, earlier responses to analogous situations and significant social influences. Together these elements establish the predictive field against which the occurrence is assessed.
Local non-derivability concerns the relation between the realised response and the antecedent repertoire as a whole. The relevant question is whether the preceding biographical configuration provided adequate predictive ground for that particular response before it occurred. Local non-derivability is present where the realised action departs from that warranted predictive field rather than merely introducing something that has not happened before.
The claim remains epistemic. What is asserted is the absence of adequate predictive derivation from the best warranted reconstruction of the antecedent repertoire available before the occurrence.
4.1.3. Material Rerouting
The occurrence must materially redirect the developing trajectory by altering an active Event Circle, changing the conditions entering a later chapter, or establishing a consequential antecedent from which another Event Circle can form. Material rerouting is present when the occurrence produces a traceable change in subsequent possibilities, obligations, exposures or consequences.
Material rerouting need not remain within the acting subject’s own biography. Where consequences enter other biographies or configurations, those changes can satisfy the requirement if they are traceable to the subject-mediated occurrence. Material rerouting may also arise through conjunction with external contingency, provided the subject-mediated occurrence materially alters what follows.
Later evidence can defeat an initial classification. A supposedly inexplicable action may become intelligible after missing antecedents are discovered. A supposedly life-changing act may prove to have little structural consequence. The concept is intentionally vulnerable to revision.
4.2. Theoretical Boundary
Aristotle’s discussions of tuchē and automaton provide an early philosophical treatment of chance within a causal world,[9] while the Nicomachean Ethics uses alogon in a distinct account of the non-rational element of the soul.[10] The term alogical is stipulative. It concerns the evidential relation between an action and an antecedent biographical model. No Aristotelian psychological division is imported into the concept.
The Alogical Jolt therefore occupies a narrow place in the architecture. It marks a local break in predictive continuity. Once the action occurs, it enters ordinary consequential succession. Its downstream effects become conditions within later circles, whether already active or formed afterwards. A jolt interrupts the expected line at one point and then becomes part of the history from which the line continues.
The Alogical Jolt is an evidential classification of subject-mediated local non-derivability. It is not offered as an ontology of the event or as a general theory of human beginning.[11]
5. Analytical Cases
The preceding sections have defined the architecture. The present section uses four hypothetical cases to demonstrate its operation. The first isolates a candidate volitional jolt. The second tests the problem of hidden disposition. The third reconstructs a road collision as a full case of Convergence. The fourth examines how one shared economic event can acquire sharply different biographical force when it enters different receiving configurations.
5.1. Case One: The Lottery Purchase
Consider a subject with a long documented pattern of financial caution. The subject has never gambled, repeatedly rejects games of chance, avoids speculative expenditure and belongs to no gambling-oriented social setting. The available record contains no recent financial crisis, new gambling contact or established pattern of impulsive risk-taking.
The subject enters a shop for an unrelated purchase and buys a single lottery ticket. Novelty alone does not establish a jolt. The relevant question concerns antecedent fit. If the best warranted reconstruction of the subject’s prior behaviour, values, dispositions and circumstances provides no adequate predictive ground for the purchase, the act can be classified provisionally as a candidate volitional Alogical Jolt.
Suppose the ticket wins a large prize. The purchase itself, not the winning numbers, is the candidate jolt. The winning numbers belong to external contingency, while the purchase belongs to the subject-mediated action under examination. The prize gives that action downstream force by changing the financial conditions from which later decisions are made.
The sequence now contains distinct elements. A stable antecedent pattern establishes an expectation. The purchase departs sharply from that expectation. External contingency produces the prize. The prize reorganises later Event Circles involving work, housing, relationships and financial choice. The act that was poorly predicted becomes, after occurrence, an antecedent with extensive consequences.
5.2. Case Two: The Rescue Response
Consider a passenger who sees a child fall from a boat into dangerous water and enters the water immediately. The child survives and the rescuer dies. The human gravity of that outcome should make the evidential standard more exacting, not less. Emotional force alone does not justify immediate classification as an Alogical Jolt.
The analyst must first reconstruct the relevant antecedent repertoire. Rescue training, swimming competence, occupational preparation, repeated protective conduct, tolerance of physical risk, explicit commitments concerning intervention and earlier behaviour in emergencies can make the response intelligible even when no previous water rescue has occurred.
Suppose extensive evidence establishes no rescue training, limited swimming ability, a consistent history of avoiding physical danger, a tendency to seek external assistance in emergencies and no relationship with the child. If the best warranted reconstruction of the antecedent repertoire still provides no adequate predictive ground for the action, and if its consequence materially redirects the relevant circles, the rescue can be treated as a candidate Alogical Jolt.
The classification remains epistemic. The action may arise from causes that biography cannot recover. The case illustrates why hidden disposition is a serious challenge rather than an inconvenience. A jolt requires more than surprise. It requires a demonstrable failure of the best warranted reconstruction available to the analyst.
The consequence also demonstrates the transfer principle. The rescuer’s death terminates that biography, while the rescue enters the child’s later history, the family’s bereavement, any institutional inquiry and the memories of witnesses. One action can end one biography and become an antecedent within several others.
5.3. Case Three: The Road Collision
A road collision demonstrates Convergence most fully because the visible event occupies seconds while the histories required to produce its exact temporal and spatial configuration can extend far beyond those seconds.
Immediate explanation usually names the pedestrian’s movement, the driver’s attention, vehicle speed, visibility or road design. Each factor may be real. Event-Circle Theory asks instead how the relevant factors came to occupy the same field at the same time.
5.3.1. The Pedestrian Sequence
Suppose the pedestrian is travelling to an appointment. The appointment establishes a destination and a required time of arrival. The scheduled time is moved earlier on the previous day because of a change in another person’s commitments. That alteration changes the pedestrian’s departure requirement.
Shortly before departure, an unrelated domestic obligation produces a small delay. The pedestrian then uses the usual public transport route. Traffic disruption caused by emergency roadworks creates a further delay. The accumulated delay now makes the usual route appear likely to produce a late arrival. The pedestrian leaves public transport earlier than normal and uses a shorter walking route.
The altered route leads to the focal junction. Each included condition has a defined analytical role. The appointment changes temporal demand. The domestic interruption changes departure time. The traffic disruption changes arrival time. The decision to leave the usual route changes location. The shorter route changes exposure to the junction.
The sequence is coherent because each element materially affects a later element relevant to the focal event. Other facts from the pedestrian’s past are excluded once they cease to alter the reconstruction. The analysis therefore remains bounded.
5.3.2. The Driver Sequence
The driver’s presence develops through a separate history. Suppose an unexpected change in work obligations requires an earlier assignment in a different part of the city. The intended vehicle fails to start. Equipment is transferred to another vehicle, producing a delay. A temporary road closure then redirects traffic through the focal junction.
These conditions affect departure requirement, elapsed time and route. They need not have any prior connection with the pedestrian’s appointment, domestic delay or transport decision. That independence matters because Convergence does not require prior interaction between the histories.
Near the point of impact, further conditions may become relevant. Speed, visual obstruction, braking distance, attention and reaction time can alter whether an encounter becomes a collision and how severe the consequence becomes. Their inclusion depends upon evidence. The wider reconstruction does not erase responsibility for immediate conduct. If distraction or excessive speed materially contributes, that action remains part of the explanation. It simply does not exhaust the explanation.
5.3.3. The Road and Its Independent History
The road contributes a third independent history. Junction geometry may derive from a planning decision made years earlier. Signal timing may have been revised for traffic flow. Roadworks elsewhere may temporarily increase traffic volume. A stationary service vehicle may reduce visibility. Surface condition, lighting and crossing distance may further alter the physical field.
The road-related history is treated according to the distinction in section 2.4: it functions as an external Event Circle only if it independently satisfies the five-condition test, and otherwise remains an external condition. Its biographical relevance begins when the participants encounter it.
5.3.4. Convergence at the Focal Event
Immediately before impact, the pedestrian sequence has produced presence at the junction. The driver sequence has produced the arrival of the vehicle. The road sequence has produced the material conditions under which the encounter occurs. These histories now become jointly consequential within one narrow interval.
This is Convergence in the present sense. The focal event cannot be adequately reconstructed from the pedestrian’s sequence alone, the driver’s sequence alone or the road conditions alone. Their conjunction produces the field in which the collision becomes actual.
The focal configuration narrows towards this point because several histories that developed separately now constrain the same coordinates of time, place, exposure and response. The event itself occupies one instant. Its formation contains histories of different lengths.
Nothing in this Convergence requires a supernatural design. The configuration becomes analytically significant because histories that began at different times and in different places become consequentially inseparable at one realised point.
5.3.5. Coherence Without Inevitability
Retrospective reconstruction can make the event fully intelligible without making it inevitable. A different appointment time could alter the pedestrian’s journey. The domestic delay could fail to occur. The transport disruption could clear. The driver could retain the ordinary assignment. The first vehicle could function. The diversion could remain unnecessary. A small change in several timing conditions could prevent the trajectories from sharing the same physical field.
These alternatives reveal the distinction between coherence and inevitability. Once the collision has occurred, its antecedent sequences can be reconstructed. Before the collision, their exact conjunction within the same consequential field was not guaranteed by the mere existence of those sequences.
The distinction also disciplines the language of destiny. The collision belongs to destiny once it has become part of the realised life. The theory does not infer that destiny existed beforehand as an instruction requiring that collision.
5.3.6. From Outcome to Antecedent
The impact closes the focal configuration and immediately becomes an antecedent of later configurations. Injury can alter health, employment and mobility. Legal processes can alter the driver’s professional and financial conditions. Family members can acquire new responsibilities. Insurance and institutional processes can begin. A road authority can review the junction and change conditions for future road users.
The focal event therefore occupies the double temporal position defined in section 2.1. It is the outcome of earlier coherent sequences and a condition entering later ones.
This is the central mechanism of consequential succession across chapters. The result of one Event Circle becomes part of the material from which later circles form. Across time, many such circles close and reopen through consequence. Their realised succession forms the linear history of the life.
5.4. Case Four: Economic Crisis and Unequal Biographical Consequence
A period of economic contraction provides a different test because one external disturbance can pass through an institution and enter several lives at once. The case isolates the relation between a common external event and the biographical configurations that receive it.
5.4.1. Macroeconomic Processes and the Organisational Event Circle
Suppose a broader contraction develops through several partly independent economic histories. In a demand-related history, declining orders and repeated customer deferrals may accumulate as the configuration narrows towards a distinguishable focal event such as the loss of a major contract or a documented fall in sales below a critical operating threshold. In a credit-related history, stricter lending criteria and rising refinancing costs may accumulate as the configuration narrows towards a denied refinancing application or a material reduction in available credit. In a competitive history, price compression and shrinking win rates may accumulate as the configuration narrows towards a distinguishable focal event such as a competitor’s entry at a price the firm cannot match on its principal product line. These histories qualify as external Event Circles only if the five conditions can be reconstructed within each of them. General economic difficulty, by itself, remains an external condition.
The employer receives the consequences of those external circles within its own organisational configuration. Sales decline, margins narrow, customers delay payment and debt absorbs more cash flow. Management reduces expenditure and postpones investment, while the available room for adjustment continues to narrow. Suppose this organisational Event Circle reaches focal realisation in a decision to make a defined group of employees redundant. The decision is an outcome within the company’s circle and, through cross-scale transfer, an incoming antecedent within the Constraint Weaves of the affected workers.
5.4.2. The Receiving Configuration
Consider one employee affected by the redundancy. Three features of the receiving configuration are especially relevant. The worker has a child undergoing treatment for a serious illness, the household holds limited liquid reserves, and the worker’s occupational skills are closely tied to the contracting sector. Each feature predates the redundancy and belongs to a different history.
The child’s illness has a history independent of the worker’s employment trajectory. Within the child’s own biography, particular phases of that history may satisfy the five conditions of an Event Circle. Symptoms can initiate a diagnostic sequence, consultations and tests can accumulate coherently, diagnostic alternatives can narrow, and a confirmed diagnosis can constitute a focal realisation whose consequences enter treatment, expenditure and caregiving arrangements. A later treatment intervention or medical deterioration may form a subsequent circle if the five conditions are again satisfied. Relative to the worker’s biography, these illness-related circles are external Event Circles. They would continue to develop whether or not the redundancy occurred. Redundancy changes the resources available to meet the consequences they transmit.
The other two features occupy different positions. Limited reserves need not form an Event Circle unless their own antecedent history satisfies the five conditions, yet they remain a material condition that shortens the period during which wage loss can be absorbed. Sector-specific skills can similarly remain a condition if no bounded circle is established, while still restricting replacement options when the same sector is contracting. These strands become jointly consequential only when the incoming redundancy enters the receiving Constraint Weave.
5.4.3. Convergence in the Household
A biographical Event Circle can now narrow as redundancy, the external illness-related circle, limited reserves and restricted employment alternatives become jointly consequential. The focal event in the worker’s biography need not be the redundancy itself. It may occur later as a household liquidity crisis, an inability to meet a necessary medical payment, or another material loss of actionable options. Redundancy is therefore the focal realisation of an organisational Event Circle and an antecedent within a different biographical configuration.
The institutional event and the biographical focal event occupy different analytical positions. The company closes one Event Circle through a redundancy decision while the same realised event begins or intensifies another circle in the worker’s life. Cross-scale transfer therefore gives one event two roles across different configurations: outcome in the producing circle and antecedent in the receiving one.
5.4.4. The Same Redundancy in a Different Configuration
Now consider another employee at a comparable grade, with similar tenure and pay, who is made redundant in the same round. The macroeconomic environment, employer and institutional decision are held constant. Suppose this worker has no comparable continuing medical-care obligation, has a substantially larger emergency reserve, and possesses skills that transfer readily to an adjacent sector. The comparison therefore turns on three differences in the receiving configuration.
The second worker still suffers a genuine loss of employment. Yet the larger reserve allows more time, transferable skills widen the accessible employment field, and the absence of a continuing medical obligation reduces immediate pressure on cash and time. The same redundancy can remain consequential without narrowing towards the same focal crisis.
5.4.5. Differential Consequence and Subsequent Circles
The comparison establishes a further implication of Event-Circle Theory. Shared exposure does not entail shared consequence. Two subjects can receive the same external event yet follow different downstream trajectories because it enters different combinations of active circles, resources, obligations and constraints. The relevant unit of analysis is the relation between the incoming event and the receiving configuration.
Once a household crisis is realised, it becomes an antecedent in its own right. Debt can alter later financial options, deferred treatment can change health and caregiving demands, and employment accepted under pressure can establish a different professional path. Conversely, successful treatment, a new job opening or another change in the Constraint Weave can prevent the severest continuation from being realised.
The case preserves the distinction between coherence and inevitability. A crisis can become intelligible through the Convergence of organisational, medical, financial and labour-market histories without having been required by any one of them. Other continuations remain possible until the conditions supporting them cease to be accessible.
This case is analytical rather than empirical. Claims about labour markets, household vulnerability or structural disadvantage require their own economic and sociological evidence when advanced as empirical propositions. The theory supplies the architecture through which such independently established conditions can be related to a particular biography.
6. Objections, Conditions of Failure and Empirical Prospects
A philosophical theory gains little from being able to reinterpret every possible objection as confirmation. Event-Circle Theory therefore requires explicit conditions under which its classifications can fail. It is presented as a philosophical architecture informed by empirical research. It is not presented as an empirically validated scientific theory.
6.1. The First Objection: Hindsight and Narrative Projection
Fischhoff showed that knowledge of an outcome changes judgements about what could supposedly have been anticipated beforehand.[12] The problem is acute for any retrospective analysis of biography. Once an outcome is known, earlier events can acquire an appearance of preparation that they did not possess prospectively.
The analysis responds by assigning greater evidential weight to records created before the focal outcome. Correspondence, medical files, employment histories, financial documents, schedules, contemporaneous testimony and other dated records can establish whether the proposed sequence existed before retrospective interpretation reorganised it.
Strawson’s criticism of narrativity adds a related caution. Some people do not experience themselves as continuous narrative selves.[13] An Event Circle therefore cannot depend upon the subject’s willingness to tell a coherent story. The analyst must recover consequential relations that remain visible beyond retrospective self-description.
6.2. The Second Objection: The Theory Can Connect Everything
A theory of converging histories risks triviality if every earlier fact can be recruited into every later outcome. Event-Circle Theory rejects that licence through the relevance criterion and the temporal boundary.
A proposed antecedent must materially alter the reconstruction of timing, location, exposure, actionable options, probability or consequence. A proposed instance of Convergence must identify the histories involved, the interval in which joint relevance begins and the difference produced by their conjunction. If those conditions cannot be shown, the connection should be discarded.
The same criterion also bounds the reconstruction of an Event Circle, and each of the five conditions in section 2.3 has a corresponding failure condition. Formation fails when no initiating condition can be shown to acquire material relevance to the focal event. Coherent accumulation fails when the alleged sequence rests on chronology or narrative association without demonstrable consequential dependence. Narrowing relevance fails when the included conditions do not become increasingly relevant to a bounded consequential field. Focal realisation fails when no analytically distinguishable event can be identified as the point at which the configuration becomes actual. Consequential continuation fails when the focal event produces no material change that can be traced into later circles or chapters. A proposed circle that fails any of these tests should be rejected or reclassified.
The same gate applies to candidates outside biography. An institutional history, disease process, market trend or other external history does not become an Event Circle merely because it extends through time or later affects a person. Each of the five conditions must be justified within that history itself. A general trend without demonstrable formation, coherent accumulation, narrowing relevance, a distinguishable focal realisation and consequential continuation remains an external condition. Cross-domain extension therefore increases the range of possible circles without relaxing the criteria that identify them.
6.3. The Third Objection: Hidden Dispositions Destroy the Alogical Jolt
No biography contains every antecedent. A first occurrence is not evidence of a new disposition. A trait can remain latent because no previous situation required its expression, so a disposition can be absent from behavioural history while remaining present in character.
The theory accepts this objection and narrows the claim accordingly. An Alogical Jolt does not claim an absence of sufficient cause. It claims that the best warranted reconstruction of the antecedent repertoire available before the occurrence provided no adequate predictive ground for the realised response. The classification becomes stronger when the relevant dimensions of the antecedent repertoire have been reconstructed with sufficient evidential depth and the realised response still falls outside what could adequately have been anticipated from that preceding biographical configuration.
The claim can in principle be strengthened through blinded judgement. Analysts who do not know the later outcome could receive a subject’s record up to time T and estimate likely responses to a defined class of situations. A candidate jolt gains evidential support when the realised response falls outside convergent predictions derived from the antecedent record and subsequently produces substantial downstream rerouting. The test therefore examines whether the realised response identified retrospectively as a candidate rupture could already have been adequately derived from the biographical configuration that preceded it.
6.4. The Fourth Objection: Safety Science Cannot Be Transferred to Biography
Reason, Rasmussen and Leveson developed their work in domains containing organisations, technologies, procedures and relatively explicit system boundaries. A biography possesses none of these features in the same form. Safety science therefore cannot function as empirical proof that human destiny has a systemic architecture.
The theory uses the comparison only for a structural proposition. Several partly independent processes can become jointly consequential, and causal understanding can be distorted when explanation is collapsed into the component nearest to the final event. Where that similarity cannot be shown, the analogy should be discarded.
6.5. The Fifth Objection: The Algorithmic Analogy Reintroduces Determinism
The algorithmic analogy can be misunderstood if the distinction between succession and computation is ignored. The theory claims that an outcome can become a condition of the next stage. It does not claim that each stage has a single possible successor or that a sufficiently informed observer could calculate the complete future.
Path dependence, external Event Circles, external conditions that do not satisfy the five-condition test, contingency, incomplete information and Alogical Jolts all prevent the analogy from becoming a doctrine of predestination. The analogy survives only at the level of consequential succession. More generally, Event-Circle Theory remains neutral concerning universal determinism. Its claims concern the reconstruction of consequential relations, not the truth or falsity of determinism as a metaphysical thesis.
6.6. An Empirical Research Programme
The architecture generates propositions that can be tested empirically. The first concerns identification reliability. Independent analysts should apply the criteria for coherent sequence, Event Circle identification, Convergence and downstream consequence to the same documentary record. Analytical position should then be assigned relative to the focal biography. If the categories correspond to recoverable structures, agreement should occur at rates meaningfully above chance.
A second test concerns prospective continuation. Analysts can identify active sequences from records ending at time T and specify which constraints, exposures or option changes should persist beyond T. Persistence beyond T that accords with the specified constraints, exposures or option changes would support the claim that the reconstructed sequence carries prospective informational value. Repeated failure would weaken that claim.
A third test concerns Convergence. Periods prospectively identified as containing several independently justified histories approaching joint relevance should be associated with larger changes in subsequent exposure, option sets or consequences than comparable periods in which the relevant histories remain separate.
A fourth test concerns Alogical Jolts. Strong candidates should combine low predictability from blinded antecedent records with substantial downstream rerouting. If adequate antecedent information makes purported jolts routinely predictable, the category loses explanatory force.
A fifth test concerns differential biographical consequence. Matched subjects exposed to the same external institutional event should show downstream variation that is better explained when their pre-existing circles, obligations, resources and external constraints are included than when exposure to the event is treated as sufficient by itself. If the receiving configuration adds no explanatory value, this part of the theory would be weakened.
These tests would not settle every philosophical question about causation, agency or destiny. They would expose the theory to evidence capable of weakening its classifications. That exposure is a condition of methodological seriousness.
7. The Shape of Destiny
Event-Circle Theory begins with the persistence of consequence and ends with the realised line of a life. Its central structure is domain-general while human destiny remains the focal application. Event Circles can occur within a biography or, where the five conditions are independently satisfied, within institutional, economic and biological processes. Their significance for a focal life depends on the analytical position from which they enter its Constraint Weave.
The line of destiny remains temporal and one-way. Its internal structure is circular in the limited sense that conditions become events and realised events become conditions of what follows. Cross-scale transfer extends this succession across domains, allowing the focal realisation of one Event Circle to become an antecedent within another Event Circle or receiving Constraint Weave at a different analytical scale. Several Event Circles can remain active at once, and Convergence can bring circles and conditions with different histories into one consequential field.
The economic case adds a further qualification. The biographical force of an incoming event is not fixed by the event alone. A redundancy decision shared by many employees can enter one life as a manageable interruption and another as the condition that precipitates a household crisis. What differs is the receiving Constraint Weave, including its active biographical Event Circles, external Event Circles and external conditions that do not satisfy the five-condition test.
Explanation must therefore trace both the event that arrives and the configuration that receives it. The action or institutional decision nearest to an outcome can remain causally and morally important while its downstream force depends upon what it encounters. This wider scale does not dilute responsibility. It locates responsibility within the actual field of available action, accumulated constraint and external exposure.
The same architecture changes how ordinary decisions are understood prospectively. A choice made for an immediate purpose can establish a condition whose later reach is not yet visible. The present is therefore a point at which future antecedents are continually being created, although their eventual conjunction with other histories cannot be known in advance.
Retrospective coherence requires restraint. Once a focal event has occurred, its antecedent sequence can appear to have been moving towards it all along. That appearance should not be converted into prospective necessity. The realised history is one path through a field of possibilities whose accessibility changed as conditions accumulated.
Alogical Jolts require the same discipline. A locally non-derivable action should not be converted into metaphysical mystery. The concept remains tied to evidence and open to revision. Its significance lies in the possibility that the realised line can change where the best warranted preceding biographical model provided inadequate predictive ground.
Event-Circle Theory therefore permits awe without requiring superstition. Histories can cross in extraordinary ways without implying that the cosmos arranged them for a purpose. A focal event can carry years of antecedent consequence without having been written in advance. What we later call destiny is the realised shape left by these consequential crossings through time.
Note on Originality and Scope
Exact-phrase searches conducted on 11 August 2026 across publicly indexed web sources did not locate a prior indexed philosophical theory under the name Event-Circle Theory or a prior indexed use of Alogical Jolt in the stipulated technical sense developed here.
This statement reports the result of those searches and does not constitute a universal claim concerning unpublished, unindexed, privately circulated or otherwise inaccessible texts. The originality claimed here concerns the definitions and relations that constitute Event-Circle Theory: the five-condition identification of an Event Circle, the use of the relevance criterion specified in section 2.1 to bound coherent sequences, the domain-general application of the five-condition form, the analytical distinction between biographical and external Event Circles relative to a focal biography, the Constraint Weave as a receiving configuration containing biographical Event Circles, external Event Circles and external conditions that do not satisfy the five-condition test, the specification of Convergence within a justified temporal and material field, cross-scale transfer as stipulated in section 3.6, the formalisation of differential consequence as the relation between an incoming event and the receiving Constraint Weave, and the Alogical Jolt as a subject-mediated rupture indexed to an antecedent repertoire rather than to an ontology of events or a metaphysical thesis about causation.
The algorithmic comparison is restricted to consequential succession. It describes the way a realised outcome can become part of the conditions entering a later stage. It carries no claim that human life is computable, programmed or predetermined.
The empirical and philosophical literature cited in this article supports selected propositions concerning narrative coherence, life-course temporality, path dependence, systemic explanation, hindsight and the conceptual boundary of alogical. Those sources do not independently establish Event-Circle Theory as an empirically validated scientific theory.
Notes
[1] Tilmann Habermas and Susan Bluck, ‘Getting a Life: The Emergence of the Life Story in Adolescence’, Psychological Bulletin, vol. 126, no. 5, 2000, pp. 748–769.
[2] Paul Ricoeur, Time and Narrative, vol. 1, translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1984.
[3] Glen H. Elder Jr., ‘The Life Course as Developmental Theory’, Child Development, vol. 69, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–12.
[4] Paul Pierson, ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics’, American Political Science Review, vol. 94, no. 2, 2000, pp. 251–267. The article is used here for the limited proposition that timing, sequence, increasing returns and the rising cost of reversal can give earlier developments durable effects upon later alternatives.
[5] James Reason, ‘Human Error: Models and Management’, BMJ, vol. 320, 2000, pp. 768–770, especially the distinction between the person and system approaches and the role of latent conditions.
[6] Jens Rasmussen, ‘Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem’, Safety Science, vol. 27, nos. 2 and 3, 1997, pp. 183–213, especially the discussion of work-system constraints, boundaries of acceptable performance and the migration of system activity under competing pressures.
[7] Nancy G. Leveson, ‘A New Accident Model for Engineering Safer Systems’, Safety Science, vol. 42, no. 4, 2004, pp. 237–270. See especially section 2, ‘Limitations of Event Chain Models’, on the arbitrariness of causal stopping points and the concentration on proximate events, and section 2.1, ‘Social and Organizational Factors’, on the need to include wider organisational and systemic conditions.
[8] Frederick P. Morgeson, Terence R. Mitchell and Dong Liu, ‘Event System Theory: An Event-Oriented Approach to the Organizational Sciences’, Academy of Management Review, vol. 40, no. 4, 2015, pp. 515–537. See especially their definition of event strength in terms of novelty, disruption and criticality, and their account of event effects across organisational space and time.
[9] Aristotle, Physics, book II, chapters 4–6, on tuchē and automaton.
[10] Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, book I, chapter 13, 1102a26–1103a3, for the distinction involving the alogon. The use of alogical in this article is stipulative and does not reproduce that psychological division.
[11] Compare Alain Badiou, Being and Event, translated by Oliver Feltham, Continuum, London, 2007, especially Books IV and V on the event, intervention and fidelity, and Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 2nd ed., enlarged, with an Introduction by Margaret Canovan and a New Foreword by Danielle Allen, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 2018, on action, natality and beginning. The Alogical Jolt as defined here is narrower: it concerns the evidential relation between a subject-mediated occurrence and the best warranted reconstruction of that subject’s antecedent repertoire.
[12] Baruch Fischhoff, ‘Hindsight Is Not Equal to Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty’, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 1, no. 3, 1975, pp. 288–299.
[13] Galen Strawson, ‘Against Narrativity’, Ratio, vol. 17, no. 4, 2004, pp. 428–452.
Bibliography
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed., enlarged. With an Introduction by Margaret Canovan and a New Foreword by Danielle Allen. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018.
Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by H. Rackham. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934.
Aristotle. Physics. Translated by R. P. Hardie and R. K. Gaye. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, vol. 1, edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.
Badiou, Alain. Being and Event. Translated by Oliver Feltham. London: Continuum, 2007.
Elder, Glen H. Jr. ‘The Life Course as Developmental Theory’. Child Development, vol. 69, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–12.
Fischhoff, Baruch. ‘Hindsight Is Not Equal to Foresight: The Effect of Outcome Knowledge on Judgment Under Uncertainty’. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance, vol. 1, no. 3, 1975, pp. 288–299.
Habermas, Tilmann, and Susan Bluck. ‘Getting a Life: The Emergence of the Life Story in Adolescence’. Psychological Bulletin, vol. 126, no. 5, 2000, pp. 748–769.
Leveson, Nancy G. ‘A New Accident Model for Engineering Safer Systems’. Safety Science, vol. 42, no. 4, 2004, pp. 237–270.
Morgeson, Frederick P., Terence R. Mitchell, and Dong Liu. ‘Event System Theory: An Event-Oriented Approach to the Organizational Sciences’. Academy of Management Review, vol. 40, no. 4, 2015, pp. 515–537.
Pierson, Paul. ‘Increasing Returns, Path Dependence, and the Study of Politics’. American Political Science Review, vol. 94, no. 2, 2000, pp. 251–267.
Rasmussen, Jens. ‘Risk Management in a Dynamic Society: A Modelling Problem’. Safety Science, vol. 27, nos. 2 and 3, 1997, pp. 183–213.
Reason, James. ‘Human Error: Models and Management’. BMJ, vol. 320, 2000, pp. 768–770.
Ricoeur, Paul. Time and Narrative. Vol. 1. Translated by Kathleen McLaughlin and David Pellauer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.
Strawson, Galen. ‘Against Narrativity’. Ratio, vol. 17, no. 4, 2004, pp. 428–452.
About the book
With deep gratitude, I wish to thank Dr Mehmet Yildiz for his generous editorial guidance, his discerning eye, and the intellectual care he has given this work.
Here is the editorial review of the book by Dr Yildiz:
The Cartography of Unbecoming
Why I Edited a Philosophical, Metaphysical, and Spiritual Book medium.com
I am equally indebted to Dr Michael Broadly, DHSc, for the generosity with which he wrote the foreword. I linked his foreword too:
Foreword to “The Cartography of Unbecoming” by Liauw Pauw Phing
Why a Retired Scientist Has an Interest in a Philosophical and Metaphysical Bookmedium.com
Their trust, encouragement, and contributions have shaped this book far beyond anything I could have achieved alone.
I am pleased that the book has been published and is available in several book stores. Here is the official page.
This book is now available for preorders and will be released on 30 April 2026. The early access digital and audio formats are available via Google Books and Google Play. Here is the landing page, which will include digital, paperback, hardcover, and audio links.
ILLUMINATION Philosophy and Metaphysics
ILLUMINATION Philosophy and Metaphysics
A publication devoted to philosophy, metaphysics, ethics, consciousness, cognition, psychology, mindfulness…medium.com
Introduction
ILLUMINATION Philosophy and Metaphysics: An Introduction by the Owner
This publication is devoted to philosophy, metaphysics, spirituality, mindfulness, psychology, ethics, consciousness…medium.com
Submission Guidelines by Dr Michael Broadly, DHSc
ILLUMINATION Philosophy and Metaphysics: Initial Submission Guidelines
Welcome to a new publication within the ILLUMINATION Integrated Publications ecosystemmedium.com
Here is some information about my background and editorial profile.
Leave a Reply