Abstract

This is a book review of Barbara Vetter's Potentiality. Philosophy is most intriguing when it teaches us seeing differently. Barbara Vetter’s book Po- tentiality & Possibility (OUP 2014) offers us precisely that: a new orthodoxy when it comes to our view of dispositions, possibility, and, most of all, potentiality. And it does so commendably well with the clarity of expression and the precision we often miss in the literature on causal powers and the like. Vetter writes on page 228: “This book is meant to be the beginning of a debate, not its end.” It is a pleasure and honour to be part of that beginning. Let us start. A first big part of her book aims to show that the standard semantic and/or metaphysical inter- pretation of dispositional predicates and/or dispositions fails and that it ought to be replaced by her potentiality metaphysics. The first half of this commentary, 1., concerns consequences this view has. A second huge part of Vetter’s project is to analyse possibility in terms of potentiality. This will be the focus of the second part, 2., of this review.