Book V Summary

Convinced of the bulk of Philosophy's arguments, Boethius now asks a few tangential questions. First, he says it seems to him that there is no room for chance in the system Philosophy describes. She responds by saying that it all depends exactly on how "chance" is defined. If chance is meant to be a kind of completely random and arbitrary force that comes into being from nothing then, indeed, she does reject it, for such a thing is metaphysical nonsense. However, there is another definition of chance, which she borrows from Aristotle, that states that an event is said to happen by chance when the result is besides the intention of the parties involved. For example, imagine if a man buried a chest of gold in a field and, years later, another man, while digging for potatoes, dug up the chest...