Abstract

How can the laws of nature, that determine how objects behave, be understood as natural objects themselves? The answer that transpires from the analysis of modern theories of the laws of nature is: laws of nature are due to the causal structure of our world. They express the causal efficiacy of fundamental properties of nature. In contrast to rivaling theories, this answer does justice to the fact that laws of nature determine the course of natural events without having to appeal to the strong assumption of necessarily acting forces. The modal force exerted by the laws of nature instead reflects a fundamental factual constitution of our world: fundamental properties like charge or mass exert their efficiacy in an unperturbed fashion, without influencing each other. The 'necessity' that laws of nature convey is hence compatible with their metaphysical contingency, the possibility of other, nomologically different worlds. The suggested theory connects laws of nature and causality in a new way: only in a temporally asymmetrical world can causality exist, and only in a causal world can fundamental properties exhibit those asymmetric relations that we call laws of nature.