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Contingency

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Abstract

It all goes back to the early 1960s, I guess.

I was an undergrad at the University of Pennsylvania, nominally majoring in biology but in fact majoring in extracurricular activities—which included journalism (The Daily Pennsylvanian), student activism, and studying butterflies. I took a BA, not a BS, and satisfied my language requirement with French, which I had pursued in high school. Not that I had any concept of potential future utility for my French; it was just the path of least resistance. And it fed into the philosophical preoccupations of the day. After all, Jean-Paul Sartre was French, n’est-ce pas?

Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.

Soren Kierkegaard

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Correspondence to Art Shapiro .

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Shapiro, A. (2015). Contingency. In: Dyer, L., Forister, M. (eds) The Lives of Lepidopterists. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-20457-4_4

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