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What is the origin of the concept of a law of nature? How much does it owe to theology and metaphysics? To what extent do the laws of nature permit contingency? Are there exceptions to the laws of nature? Is it possible to give a reductive analysis of lawhood, or is it a primitive?
Twelve new essays by an international team of leading philosophers take up these and other central questions on the laws of nature, whilst also examining some of the most important intuitions and assumptions that have guided the debate over laws of nature since the concepts invention in the seventeenth century.
Laws of Nature spans the history of philosophy and of science, contemporary metaphysics, and contemporary philosophy of science.
List of contents
- 1: Walter Ott and Lydia Patton: Intuitions and Assumptions in the Debate over Laws of Nature
- 2: Helen Hattab: Early Modern Roots of the Philosophical Concept of a Law of Nature
- 3: Mary Domski: Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of Things: Descartes and Newton on Truth in Natural Philosophy
- 4: Walter Ott: Leges sive natura: Bacon, Spinoza, and a Forgotten Concept of Law
- 5: Stathis Psillos: Laws and Powers in the Frame of Nature
- 6: Angela Breitenbach: Laws and Ideal Unity
- 7: John W. Carroll: Becoming Humean
- 8: Michela Massimi: A Perspectivalist Better Best System Account of Lawhood
- 9: James Woodward: Laws: An Invariance Based Account
- 10: Marc Lange: How the Explanations of Natural Laws Make Some Reducible Physical Properties Natural and Explanatorily Powerful
- 11: Stephen Mumford: Laws and their Exceptions
- 12: Nancy Cartwright and Pedro Merlussi: Are laws of nature consistent with contingency?
About the author
Walter Ott is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception (2017), Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy (2009), and Lockes Philosophy of Language (2004). His work has appeared in such journals as Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.
Lydia Patton is an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech. She edited Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader (2014), and co-edited, with Benjamin Jantzen and Deborah Mayo, a special issue of Synthese on ontology and methodology. Her work has appeared in Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Kant-Studien, and Historia Mathematica, among others, and in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century. She is editor-in-chief of HOPOS.
Summary
Twelve brand-new essays by an international team of leading philosophers examine central questions on the laws of nature, such as: what is the origin of the concept of a law of nature? How much does it owe to theology and metaphysics? And, are there exceptions to the laws of nature?
Additional text
Ott and Patton ... have assembled a diverse group of scholars to examine the origins and status of the modern scientific concept of natural law ... clearly written ... Highly recommended.
Report
The book manifests a wide diversity of viewpoints and approaches. The articles themselves are timely and of a consistently very high quality, which speaks to the virtues of Ott and Patton's editorial work, and the book can truly be said to have something for everyone who is interested in laws of nature. Jason Winning, Metascience
