Laws of Nature, Misc

Edited by Markus Schrenk (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
Assistant editor: Daian Bica (Heinrich Heine University Düsseldorf)
About this topic
Summary Please see middle category "laws of nature".
Key works Please see middle category "laws of nature".
Introductions Please see middle category "laws of nature".
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528 found
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  1. A Counterexample to Huemer's ’No Matter What’ Interpretation of the Consequence Argument. Mansooreh - manuscript
    The consequence argument is a salient argument in favor of incompatibilism which is the thesis that if determinism is true, then it is not the case that we have free will. In a nutshell, the consequence argument has it that if determinism is true, then our acts are determined by the laws of nature and events of the past. But we are neither able to change the past nor the laws of nature. Therefore, we are not able to change the (...)
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  2. Space, Pure Intuition, and Laws in the Metaphysical Foundations.James Messina - manuscript
    I am interested in the use Kant makes of the pure intuition of space, and of properties and principles of space and spaces (i.e. figures, like spheres and lines), in the special metaphysical project of MAN. This is a large topic, so I will focus here on an aspect of it: the role of these things in his treatment of some of the laws of matter treated in the Dynamics and Mechanics Chapters. In MAN and other texts, Kant speaks of (...)
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  3. Freedom to do Otherwise and the Contingency of the Laws of Nature.Jeff Mitchell - manuscript
    This article argues that the freedom of voluntary action can be grounded in the contingency of the laws of nature. That is, the possibility of doing otherwise is equivalent to the possibility of the laws being otherwise. This equivalence can be understood in terms of an agent drawing a boundary between self and not-self in the domains of both matter and laws, defining the extent of the body and of voluntary behaviour. In particular, the article proposes that we can think (...)
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  4. Counterfactuals, Irreversible Laws and The Direction of Time.Terrance A. Tomkow - manuscript
    The principle of Information Conservation or Determinism is a governing assumption of physical theory. Determinism has counterfactual consequences. It entails that if the present were different, then the future would be different. But determinism is temporally symmetric: it entails that if the present were different, the past would also have to be different. This runs contrary to our commonsense intuition that what has happened in the future depends on the past in a way the past does not depend on the (...)
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  5. A Current Perspective on Science, Scientists and "Scientific Temper": Busting Myths and Misconceptions.Bimal Prasad Mahapatra -
    This article is devoted to define and characterize ‘Science’ as a discipline by the fundamental principles of scientific investigation. In particular, we propose and argue that ‘Science’ be defined by a set of principles / criteria which underlies scientific- investigation. We argue that this set must include the following principles: (1) Rationality, (2) Objectivity (3) Universality, (4) Internal Consistency, (5) Uniqueness, (6) Reproducibility, (7) The Principle of Falsification, (8) Simplicity and Elegance and (9) Experimental Observation and Verification. We elaborate, through (...)
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  6. Fundamental Objects without Fundamental Properties: A Thin-oriented Metaphysics Grounded on Structure.Valia Allori - forthcoming - In J. Arenhart D. Aerts (ed.), Probing the Meaning and Structure of Quantum Mechanics. World Scientific.
    The scientific realist wants to read the metaphysical picture of reality through our best fundamental physical theories. The traditional way of doing so is in terms of objects, properties, and laws of nature. For instance, there are families of fundamental particles individuated by their properties of mass and charge, which determine how they move around. One could call this view an object-oriented metaphysics grounded on properties. In this paper, I wish to present an alternative view that one can dub a (...)
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  7. Rethinking Laws of Nature.Yemima Ben-Menahem (ed.) - forthcoming - Springer.
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  8. An Empirical Argument for Presentism.David Builes & Michele Odisseas Impagnatiello - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Metaphysics.
    According to orthodoxy, our best physical theories strongly support Eternalism over Presentism. Our goal is to argue against this consensus, by arguing that a certain overlooked aspect of our best physical theories strongly supports Presentism over Eternalism.
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  9. Strong Determinism.Eddy Keming Chen - forthcoming - Philosophers' Imprint.
    A strongly deterministic theory of physics is one that permits exactly one possible history of the universe. In the words of Penrose (1989), "it is not just a matter of the future being determined by the past; the entire history of the universe is fixed, according to some precise mathematical scheme, for all time.” Such an extraordinary feature may appear unattainable in any realistic and simple theory of physics. In this paper, I propose a definition of strong determinism and contrast (...)
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  10. The primitivist response to the inference problem.Ashley Coates - forthcoming - Dialectica.
    While the inference problem is widely thought to be one of the most serious problems facing non-Humean accounts of laws, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that a primitivist response straightforwardly dissolves the problem. On this basis, he claims that the inference problem is really a pseudo-problem. Here I clarify the prospects of a primitivist response to the inference problem and their implications for the philosophical significance of the problem. I argue both that it is a substantial question whether this sort of (...)
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  11. The Problem of Nomological Harmony.Brian Cutter & Bradford Saad - forthcoming - Noûs.
    Our universe features a harmonious match between laws and states: applying its laws to its states generates other states. This is a striking fact. Matters might have been otherwise. The universe might have been stillborn in a state unengaged by its laws. The problem of nomological harmony is that of explaining the noted striking fact. After introducing and developing this problem, we canvass candidate solutions and identify some of their virtues and vices. Candidate solutions invoke the likes of a designer, (...)
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  12. Principles, laws and theories: The fabric of science.C. Dilworth - forthcoming - Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science.
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  13. Kant’s Theoretical Philosophy: The ‘Analytic’ Tradition.James O'Shea - forthcoming - In Sorin Baiasu & Mark Timmons (eds.), The Kantian Mind. Routledge.
    ABSTRACT: In a previous article (O’Shea 2006) I provided a concise overview of the reception of Kant’s philosophy among analytic philosophers during the periods from the ‘early analytic’ reactions to Kant in Frege, Russell, Carnap and others, to the systematic Kant-inspired works in epistemology and metaphysics of C. I. Lewis and P. F. Strawson, in particular. In this chapter I use the recently reinvigorated work of Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989) in the second half of the twentieth century as the basis for (...)
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  14. Why Confirm Laws?Barry Ward - forthcoming - The British Journal for the Philosophy of Science.
    We argue that a particular approach to satisfying the broad predictive ambitions of the sciences demands law confirmation. On this approach we confirm non-nomic generalizations by confirming there are no actually realized ways of causing disconfirming cases. This gives causal generalizations a crucial role in prediction. We then show how rational judgements of relevant causal similarity can be used to confirm that causal generalizations themselves have no actual disconfirmers, providing a distinctive and clearly viable methodology for inductively confirming them. Finally, (...)
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  15. Fundamentality and Levels in Everettian Quantum Mechanics.Alastair Wilson - forthcoming - In Valia Allori (ed.), Quantum Mechanics and Fundamentality. Springer.
    Distinctions in fundamentality between different levels of description are central to the viability of contemporary decoherence-based Everettian quantum mechanics (EQM). This approach to quantum theory characteristically combines a determinate fundamental reality (one universal wave function) with an indeterminate emergent reality (multiple decoherent worlds). In this chapter I explore how the Everettian appeal to fundamentality and emergence can be understood within existing metaphysical frameworks, identify grounding and concept fundamentality as promising theoretical tools, and use them to characterize a system of explanatory (...)
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  16. The Necessity of Nature: God, Science and Money in 17th Century English Law of Nature.Mónica García-Salmones Rovira - 2023 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    To understand our current world crises, it is essential to study the origins of the systems and institutions we now take for granted. This book takes a novel approach to charting intellectual, scientific and philosophical histories alongside the development of the international legal order by studying the philosophy and theology of the Scientific Revolution and its impact on European natural law, political liberalism and political economy. Starting from analysis of the work of Thomas Hobbes, Robert Boyle and John Locke on (...)
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  17. Newton's “law-first” epistemology and “matter-first” metaphysics.Caleb Hazelwood - 2023 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 101 (C):40-47.
    Much has been written on Newton’s concept of matter, as well as Newton’s laws. Meanwhile, the metaphysical and epistemological relationships between these two principal features of Newtonian philosophy are relatively unexplored. Among the existing accounts of the relationship between bodies and laws, two are especially compelling: the “law-constitutive” approach from Katherine Brading and the “formal-cause” approach from Zvi Biener and Eric Schliesser. Both accounts argue that Newton’s bodies are (at least partially) metaphysically dependent on the laws. That is, according to (...)
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  18. Laws of Nature.Tyler Hildebrand - 2023 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    This Element provides an opinionated introduction to the metaphysics of laws of nature. The first section distinguishes between scientific and philosophical questions about laws and describes some criteria for a philosophical account of laws. Subsequent sections explore the leading philosophical theories in detail, reviewing the most influential arguments in the literature. The final few sections assess the state of the field and suggest avenues for future research.
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  19. Decretalism Is (Still) Not Occasionalism.Jeffrey Koperski - 2023 - Philosophia Christi 25 (1):117-125.
    In “Koperski’s New (Improved?) Decretalism,” Robert Larmer argues that my version of nomological realism about the laws of nature logically entails occasionalism. Here I clarify and defend my view against this charge. The main disagreement is whether a proper account of the laws of nature must involve dynamic production—what is commonly called oomph.
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  20. Koperski’s New (Improved?) Decretalism.Robert A. Larmer - 2023 - Philosophia Christi 25 (1):105-116.
    In “Breaking Laws of Nature” published in this journal in 2017, Jeffrey Koperski defended a position he termed “decretalism” in which he claimed that the laws of nature should be understood as the decrees of God. In “Decretalism and the Laws of Nature” also published in this journal in 2017, I argued that Koperski’s decretalism amounts to occasionalism. In his recent book, Divine Action, Determinism, and the Laws of Nature, Koperski has responded to my criticisms by changing his account of (...)
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  21. Humean Laws for Human Agents.Christian Loew, Siegfried Jaag & Michael Townsen Hicks (eds.) - 2023 - Oxford: Oxford UP.
    Humean Laws for Human Agents presents cutting-edge research by leading experts on the Humean account of laws, chance, possibility, and necessity. A central question in metaphysics and philosophy of science is: What are laws of nature? Humeans hold that laws are not sui generis metaphysical entities but merely particularly effective summaries of what actually happens. The most discussed recent work on Humeanism emphasizes the laws' usefulness for limited agents and uses pragmatic considerations to address fundamental and long-standing problems. The current (...)
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  22. The Metaphysics of Bohmian Mechanics: A Comprehensive Guide to the Different Interpretations of Bohmian Ontology.Vera Matarese - 2023 - De Gruyter.
    The aim of this book is to provide a comprehensive guide to the metaphysics of Bohmian mechanics. Bohmian mechanics is a quantum theory that describes the motion of particles following trajectories that are determined by the quantum wave-function. The key question that the theory has to face relates to the ontological interpretation of the quantum wave-function. The main debate has mostly centered around two opposing views, wave-function realism on the one hand, and the nomological view on the other hand. The (...)
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  23. The Necessity of Primary Causes: A Critique of Denis Edwards.Emma McGowan - 2023 - New Blackfriars 104 (1111):323-338.
    In this paper I will investigate a recent development on St Thomas Aquinas’ definition of dual causality and see if it truly develops Aquinas’ thinking or departs from it. Denis Edwards made significant contributions to contemporary Catholic theology especially as it concerns the relationship between science and Christian theology. In one very interesting publication, ‘Toward a Theology of Divine Action’, Edwards employs the developments of William R Stoeger, a Jesuit theologian who has also contributed a great deal to Catholic thought (...)
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  24. The Nomic Likelihood Account of Laws.Christopher J. G. Meacham - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 9 (9):230-284.
    An adequate account of laws should satisfy at least five desiderata: it should provide a unified account of laws and chances, it should yield plausible relations between laws and chances, it should vindicate numerical chance assignments, it should accommodate dynamical and non-dynamical chances, and it should accommodate a plausible range of nomic possibilities. No extant account of laws satisfies these desiderata. This paper presents a non-Humean account of laws, the Nomic Likelihood Account, that does.
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  25. Reconstructing Newton’s Conception of the Laws of Nature.Cristian Soto - 2023 - Revista de Humanidades de Valparaíso 23:309-330.
    We routinely speak of Newton’s laws in classical mechanics without really knowing how Newton understood such laws. This article clarifies some of the ontological, epistemological, and theological presuppositions underpinning his conception of the laws of nature. After introducing the Cartesian background (2), we examine the Newtonian view of laws of nature in three respects, namely: the character of laws of nature in the context of the rules for natural philosophy (3); the emanative conception of space and time in _De Gravitatione_; (...)
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  26. The Necessity of Empirical Laws of Nature through the Lens of Kant’s Dialectic.Lorenzo Spagnesi - 2023 - Kantian Review 28 (3):413-428.
    This article analyses a sceptical challenge resulting from metaphysical approaches to the problem of the necessity of empirical laws of nature in Kant’s critical philosophy (what I shall call ‘essentialist’ readings). I argue that this challenge may jeopardize the purpose of empirical enquiry (and therefore the plausibility of essentialist readings), but that Kant has internal resources to address it in the Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason. I show that reading this problem through the lens of the Dialectic allows (...)
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  27. Les lois de la nature et le problème de l'induction.Julien Tricard - 2023 - Paris: Les Matériologiques. Translated by Philippe Huneman, Guillaume Lecointre & Marc Silberstein.
    Que sont les « lois de la nature » que les sciences empiriques, et en premier lieu la physique, tentent de saisir? Et si les scientifiques ne peuvent les découvrir, ou du moins les confirmer, que sur la base de l’expérience, quels sont la nature et le fondement de leurs opérations inductives? Comment garantir la possibilité d’une authentique connaissance de ces lois qui structurent la réalité? Ce livre propose une enquête épistémologique et métaphysique au cours de laquelle deux fils directeurs (...)
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  28. Laws of Nature as Constraints.Emily Adlam - 2022 - Foundations of Physics 52 (1):1-41.
    The laws of nature have come a long way since the time of Newton: quantum mechanics and relativity have given us good reasons to take seriously the possibility of laws which may be non-local, atemporal, ‘all-at-once,’ retrocausal, or in some other way not well-suited to the standard dynamical time evolution paradigm. Laws of this kind can be accommodated within a Humean approach to lawhood, but many extant non-Humean approaches face significant challenges when we try to apply them to laws outside (...)
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  29. Rethinking the Concept of Law of Nature: Natural Order in the Light of Contemporary Science.Yemima Ben-Menahem (ed.) - 2022 - Springer.
    This book subjects the traditional concept of law of nature to critical examination. There are two kinds of reasons that invite this reexamination, one deriving from philosophical concerns over the traditional concept, the other motivated by theoretical and practical changes in science. One of the philosophical worries is that the idiom of law of nature, especially when combined with the notion of laws 'governing' individual events and processes, is no longer as intelligible as it used to be in the theistic (...)
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  30. Navigating Massimi’s Perspectival Garden with Inferential Forking Paths. [REVIEW]Daian Bica - 2022 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 35 (3-4):291-303.
    In this review article, I situate Michela Massimi’s 2022 Perspectival Realism book in the broader state of the art of the contemporary philosophy of science by examining critically its contribution to the perspectival realism debate. Setting up a new agenda of philosophical problems for the perspectival realist, Massimi’s book is the most comprehensive assessment of perspectival realism since the publication of Giere’s 2006 Giere, Ronald. Ed. 2006. Scientific Perspectivism. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.[Crossref], [Google Scholar] Scientific Perspectivism (the starting (...)
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  31. Lawful Persistence.David Builes & Trevor Teitel - 2022 - Philosophical Perspectives 36 (1):5-30.
    The central aim of this paper is to use a particular view about how the laws of nature govern the evolution of our universe in order to develop and evaluate the two main competing options in the metaphysics of persistence, namely endurantism and perdurantism. We begin by motivating the view that our laws of nature dictate not only qualitative facts about the future, but also which objects will instantiate which qualitative properties. We then show that both traditional doctrines in the (...)
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  32. Fundamental Nomic Vagueness.Eddy Keming Chen - 2022 - Philosophical Review 131 (1):1-49.
    If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon 'fundamental nomic vagueness.' I characterize fundamental nomic vagueness as the existence of borderline lawful worlds and the presence of several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such vagueness prevents the fundamental physical theory from being completely expressible in the mathematical language. Moreover, I suggest that such vagueness can be regarded as (...)
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  33. Interacting Minds in the Physical World.Alin C. Cucu - 2022 - Dissertation, University of Lausanne
    Mental causation, idea that it is us – via our minds – who cause bodily actions is as commonsensical as it is indispensable for our understanding of ourselves as rational agents. Somewhat less uncontroversial, but nonetheless widespread (at least among ordinary people) is the idea that the mind is non-physical, following the intuition that what is physical can neither act nor think nor judge morally. Taken together, and cast into a metaphysical thesis, the two intuitions yield interactive dualism: the view (...)
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  34. Das Exemplarische und der Naturgesetzbegriff.Andreas Hüttemann - 2022 - In Michela Summa & Karl Mertens (eds.), Das Exemplarische – Orientierung für menschliches Wissen und Handeln. Paderborn: mentis. pp. 175-191.
    The paper explores the relation of the concepts of an exemplar and that of a law of nature.
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  35. Powers, Time and Free Will.Anna Marmodoro, Christopher Austin & Andrea Roselli (eds.) - 2022 - Springer.
    This book brings together twelve original contributions by leading scholars on the much-debated issues of what is free will and how can we exercise it in a world governed by laws of nature. Which conception of laws of nature best fits with how we conceive of free will? And which constraints does our conception of the laws of nature place on how we think of free will? The metaphysics of causation and the metaphysics of dispositions are also explored in this (...)
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  36. The Metaphysics of Laws of Nature: The Rules of the Game.Walter Ott - 2022 - Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
    It can seem obvious that we live in a world governed by laws of nature, yet it was not until the seventeenth century that the concept of a law came to the fore. Ever since, it has been attended by controversy: what does it mean to say that Boyle's law governs the expansion of a gas, or that the planets obey the law of gravity? Laws are rules that permit calculations and predictions. What does the universe have to be like, (...)
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  37. Philosophy of Science.Alik Pelman - 2022 - Israel: Open University Press.
  38. Kinds and Explanations.Petter Sandstad & Ludger Jansen - 2022 - In Mirosław Szatkowski (ed.), E.J. Lowe and Ontology. New York, USA: pp. 165-187.
    Sparrows fly because they are birds. This mushroom is poisonous because it is an Amanita muscaria. Pointing out the kind to which things belong explains many of their properties. Jonathan Lowe’s four-category ontology and his account of laws of nature provide a framework to account for the explanatory appeal of referring to kind membership. For Lowe, “Electron has Unit-negative charge” is a typical example for a law of nature: a kind universal characterized by a property universal. We present both Lowe’s (...)
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  39. From metaphysical principles to dynamical laws.Marius Stan - 2022 - In David Marshall Miller & Dana Jalobeanu (eds.), The Cambridge History of Philosophy of the Scientific Revolution. New York, NY, USA: Cambridge University Press. pp. 387-405.
    My thesis in this paper is: the modern concept of laws of motion—qua dynamical laws—emerges in 18th-century mechanics. The driving factor for it was the need to extend mechanics beyond the centroid theories of the late-1600s. The enabling result behind it was the rise of differential equations. -/- In consequence, by the mid-1700s we see a deep shift in the form and status of laws of motion. The shift is among the critical inflection points where early modern mechanics turns into (...)
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  40. A Basic Theory of Everything: A Fundamental Theoretical Framework for Science and Philosophy.Atle Ottesen Søvik - 2022 - Boston: De Gruyter.
    What are the basic building blocks of the world? This book presents a naturalistic theory saying that the universe and everything in it can be reduced to three fundamental entities: a field, a set of values that can be actualized at different places in the field, and an actualizer of the values. The theory is defended by using it to answer the main questions in metaphysics, such as: What is causality, existence, laws of nature, consciousness, thinking, free will, time, mathematical (...)
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  41. Natural Kinds, Mind-independence, and Unification Principles.Tuomas E. Tahko - 2022 - Synthese 200 (2):1-23.
    There have been many attempts to determine what makes a natural kind real, chief among them is the criterion according to which natural kinds must be mind-independent. But it is difficult to specify this criterion: many supposed natural kinds have an element of mind-dependence. I will argue that the mind-independence criterion is nevertheless a good one, if correctly understood: the mind-independence criterion concerns the unification principles for natural kinds. Unification principles determine how natural kinds unify their properties, and only those (...)
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  42. Matter and Mathematics: An Essentialist Account of Laws of Nature.Andrew Younan (ed.) - 2022 - Washington, D.C.: The Catholic University of America Press.
    To borrow a phrase from Galileo: What does it mean that the story of the creation is "written in the language of mathematics?" This book is an attempt to understand the natural world, its consistency, and the ontology of what we call laws of nature, with a special focus on their mathematical expression. It does this by arguing in favor of the Essentialist interpretation over that of the Humean and Anti-Humean accounts. It re-examines and critiques Descartes' notion of laws of (...)
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  43. What’s So Spatial about Time Anyway?Sam Baron & Peter W. Evans - 2021 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 72 (1):159-183.
    Skow ([2007]), and much more recently Callender ([2017]), argue that time can be distinguished from space due to the special role it plays in our laws of nature: our laws determine the behaviour of physical systems across time, but not across space. In this work we assess the claim that the laws of nature might provide the basis for distinguishing time from space. We find that there is an obvious reason to be sceptical of the argument Skow submits for distinguishing (...)
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  44. Disagreement About Scientific Ontology.Bruno Borge - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie:1-17.
    In this paper, I analyze some disagreements about scientific ontology as cases of disagreement between epistemic peers. I maintain that the particularities of these cases are better understood if epistemic peerhood is relativized to a perspective-like index of epistemic goals and values. Taking the debate on the metaphysics of laws of nature as a case study, I explore the limits and possibilities of a trans-perspective assessment of positions regarding scientific ontology.
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  45. Leibniz and Kant on Empirical Miracles: Rationalism, Freedom, and the Laws.Andrew Chignell - 2021 - In Brandon Look (ed.), Leibniz and Kant. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 320-354.
    Leibniz and Kant were heirs of a biblical theistic tradition which viewed miraculous activity in the world as both possible and actual. But both were also deep explanatory rationalists about the natural world: more committed than your average philosophical theologian to its thoroughgoing intelligibility. These dual sympathies—supernaturalist religion and empirical rationalism—generate a powerful tension across both philosophers’ systems, one that is most palpable in their accounts of empirical miracles—that is, events in nature that violate one or more of the natural (...)
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  46. What’s so special about initial conditions? Understanding the past hypothesis in directionless time.Matt Farr - 2021 - In Yemima Ben-Menahem (ed.), Rethinking the Concept of Laws of Nature: Natural order in the Light of Contemporary Science. Springer.
    It is often said that the world is explained by laws of nature together with initial conditions. But does that mean initial conditions don’t require further explanation? And does the explanatory role played by initial conditions entail or require that time has a preferred direction? This chapter looks at the use of the ‘initialness defence’ in physics, the idea that initial conditions are intrinsically special in that they don’t require further explanation, unlike the state of the world at other times. (...)
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  47. On the Explanatory Power of Dispositional Realism.Nélida Gentile & Susana Lucero - 2021 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie:1-16.
    The article focuses on the unifying and explanatory power of the selective realism defended by Anjan Chakravartty. Our main aim is twofold. First, we critically analyse the purported synthesis between entity realism and structural realism offered by the author. We give reasons to think that this unification is an inconvenient marriage. In the second step, we deal with certain controversial aspects of the intended unification among three metaphysical concepts: causation, laws of nature and natural kinds. After pointing out that Chakravartty’s (...)
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  48. The nomological argument for the existence of God.Tyler Hildebrand & Thomas Metcalf - 2021 - Noûs 56 (2):443-472.
    According to the Nomological Argument, observed regularities in nature are best explained by an appeal to a supernatural being. A successful explanation must avoid two perils. Some explanations provide too little structure, predicting a universe without regularities. Others provide too much structure, thereby precluding an explanation of certain types of lawlike regularities featured in modern scientific theories. We argue that an explanation based in the creative, intentional action of a supernatural being avoids these two perils whereas leading competitors do not. (...)
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  49. Kant, causation and laws of nature.James Hutton - 2021 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 86 (C):93-102.
    In the Second Analogy, Kant argues that every event has a cause. It remains disputed what this conclusion amounts to. Does Kant argue only for the Weak Causal Principle that every event has some cause, or for the Strong Causal Principle that every event is produced according to a universal causal law? Existing interpretations have assumed that, by Kant’s lights, there is a substantive difference between the two. I argue that this is false. Kant holds that the concept of cause (...)
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  50. Empiricism and Philosophy of Physics.Lars-Göran Johansson - 2021 - Cham: Springer Verlag.
    This book presents a thoroughly empiricist account of physics. By providing an overview of the development of empiricism from Ockham to van Fraassen the book lays the foundation for its own version of empiricism. Empiricism for the author consists of three ideas: nominalism, i.e. dismissing second order quantification as unnecessary, epistemological naturalism, and viewing classification of things in natural kinds as a human habit not in need for any justification. The book offers views on the realism-antirealism debate as well as (...)
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