Abstract

Questions concerning casual involvement of empirican properties have recently given rise to a lively philosophical controversy known as the debate about dispositions. I begin with a description of the focal points of the debate: the issue of the viability of the conditional analysis of dispostions, the question of whether or not they ultimately constitute a distinct kind of properties, the conundrum concerning their causal efficacy, and finally the bold suggestion that all properties are dispositional. Along the way I sketch current theories of the anture of dispositions. Then I draw a fuller picture of dispositionalism, i.e. of the family of positions united by embracing the ontological distinctness of dispositions and their causal efficacy. I conclude by defending dispositionalism against the objection, raised by David Armstrong, that it is committed to the existence of Meinongian objects.