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Full Description
Causation and Laws of Nature is a collection of articles which represents current research on the metaphysics of causation and laws of nature, mostly by authors working in or active in the Australasian region. The book provides an overview of current work on the theory of causation, including counterfactual, singularist, nomological and causal process approaches. It also covers work on the nature of laws of nature, with special emphasis on the scientific essentialist theory that laws of nature are, at base, the fundamental dispositions or capacities of natural kinds of things. Because the book represents a good cross-section of authors currently working on these themes in the Australasian region, it conveys something of the interest and excitement of an active philosophical debate between advocates of several different research programmes in the area.
Contents
I. Laws And Causes.- Making Sense of Laws of Physics.- II. Scientific Essentialism.- Causal Powers and Laws of Nature.- Comment on Ellis.- Response to David Armstrong.- Scientific Ellisianism.- Bigelow's Worries About Scientific Essentialism.- The Naturalness Theory of Laws.- Nomic Necessity and Natural States: Comment on the Leckey-Bigelow Theory of Laws.- III. Laws, Quantities and Dispositions.- Are the Laws of Nature Deductively Closed?.- Laws of Nature as Relations Between Quantities?.- Real Law in Peirce's "Pragmaticism" (Or: How Scholastic Realism Met the Scientific Method).- Finkish Dispositions.- Comments on David Lewis: 'Finkish Dispositions'.- Laws and Cosmology.- Comment on Smart.- IV. Causation and Theories of Causation.- The Open Door: Counterfactual versus Singularist Theories of Causation.- Causal Dependence and Laws.- Causation is the Transfer of Information.- Good Connections: Causation and Causal Processes.- Probabilistic Causal Structure.- Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Conceptions of Causation.- The Role of History in Microphysics.- No Interaction Without Prior Correlation: Comment on Huw Price.- Notes on Contributors.
