Construing miracles as \textquotedblleft{}violations,\textquotedblright I argue that a law of nature must specify some kind of possibility. But we must have here a sense of possibility for which the ancient rule of logic---ab esse ad posse valet consequentia---does not hold. We already have one example associated with the concept of statute law, a law which specifies what is legally possible but which is not destroyed by a violation. If laws of nature are construed as specifying some analogous (...) sense of what is naturally possible, then they need not be invalidated by a (rare) violation, and Humean miracles remain a genuine possibility. (shrink)

SummaryIn his essay on rational theology Holm Tetens broaches the issue of God’s role as creator and additionally addresses the relationship of the absolute to the contingent world in a philosophical perspective. By making this a topic, the question arises as to whether or not God’s creative activities are limited by the laws of nature. According to Tetens, God as the infinite self-conscious subject must not just considered as free from all restrictions concerning his creative activities, but rather, (...) characterized as the absolute, he must be thought of as the ultimate ground of all beings, and therefore also as the creator of natural laws. In this article I will give a brief sketch of how this task could be tackled in philosophical terms. In doing so I will both pick up some of Tetens’ main intentions and concepts and try to explore them in some detail, as well as attempt to link them with the principle of determinacy as the main characteristic of the absolute. (shrink)

Review of: Seide, Ansgar, Die Notwendigkeit empirischer Naturgesetze bei Kant, Berlin- Boston, de Gruyter, 2020, pp. 417. ISBN: 978-3-11-069713-1.

Realists about laws of nature and their Humean opponents disagree on whether laws ‘govern’. An independent commitment to the ‘governing conception’ of laws pushes many towards the realist camp. Despite its significance, however, no satisfactory account of governance has been offered. The goal of this article is to develop such an account. I base my account on two claims. First, we should distinguish two notions of governance, ‘guidance’ and ‘production’, and secondly, explanatory phenomena other than (...) class='Hi'>laws are also candidates for governance. My goal is to develop a unified account which captures both guidance and production as well as the governance of phenomena, such as essence and logical consequence. The account of governance I develop belongs to the family of modal accounts, which was popularized by David Armstrong, but it also employs essentialist resources. If successful, this modal-essentialist account not only reveals the costs that proponents of governance incur, but it also puts that important notion on a solid theoretical foundation. (shrink)

English summary: The focus by individual ancient (or modern) authors in various fields (law, philosophy, science, theology, literature) on how to use the concept of natural law led to biases that this volume wants to help overcome through a preview of the 'historical depth' of the concept. Its particular charm lies in the fact that its two components (Nature and Law) stand in strong tension with each other, which to the present day does not appear to be fully resolved. (...) While in the classical Greek philosophy of Plato and Aristotle the world is not reduced to an intentional act of creation, the introduction of the concept of natural law by the Stoics and its absorption by Christian writers develops the idea of a divine order underlying natural order. Its challenge by modern science has led to an unresolved uncertainty about ethical and social standards. German text. German description: Die Fokussierung auf die Verwendungsweise des Begriffs des Naturgesetzes bei einzelnen antiken (oder modernen) Autoren auf den unterschiedlichsten Gebieten (Jurisprudenz, Philosophie, Naturwissenschaft, Theologie, Literatur) fuehrte zu Einseitigkeiten, die dieser Band durch einen Ausblick auf die ehistorische Tiefe' des Begriffs ueberwinden hilft. Sein besonderer Reiz liegt darin, dass seine beiden Bestandteile (Natur und Gesetz) in einer starken Spannung zueinander stehen, die bis auf den heutigen Tag nicht voll aufgelost erscheint. Wahrend in der klassischen griechischen Philosophie bei Platon und Aristoteles die Welt nicht auf einen intentionalen Schopfungsakt zurueckgefuehrt wird, entwickelt sich mit der Einfuehrung des Begriffs des Naturgesetzes durch die Stoiker und dessen Ubernahme durch christliche Autoren die Vorstellung einer gottlichem Befehl unterliegenden Naturordnung. Deren Infragestellung durch die moderne Naturwissenschaft hat zu einer nicht aufgelosten Unsicherheit ueber ethische und gesellschaftliche Massstabe gefuehrt. (shrink)

The paper discusses Cudworth's plastice natures and More's spirit of nature in the context of different 17th century conceptions of laws of nature.

The notion of a law of nature is a central component of our scientific and philosophical conception of reality. The lawful character of our world makes natural phenomena predictable, understandable and manipulable in specific ways. This book provides a systematic overview of the most important philosophical conceptions of laws and concludes with a presentation of a novel version of the best systems theory.

In this paper, we argue that the Consequence Argument relies on empirical premises. In particular, we show how the argument depends upon assumptions about the character of the laws of nature.

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.

John Carroll undertakes a careful philosophical examination of laws of nature, causation, and other related topics. He argues that laws of nature are not susceptible to the sort of philosophical treatment preferred by empiricists. Indeed he shows that emperically pure matters of fact need not even determine what the laws are. Similar, even stronger, conclusions are drawn about causation. Replacing the traditional view of laws and causation requiring some kind of foundational legitimacy, the author (...) argues that these phenomena are inextricably intertwined with everything else. This distinctively clear and detailed discussion of what it is to be a law will be valuable to a broad swathe of philosophers in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Humeans and anti-Humeans agree that laws of nature should explain scientifically particular matters of fact. One objection to Humean accounts of laws contends that Humean laws cannot explain particular matters of fact because their explanations are harmfully circular. This article distinguishes between metaphysical and semantic characterizations of the circularity and argues for a new semantic version of the circularity objection. The new formulation suggests that Humean explanations are harmfully circular because the content of the sentences being (...) explained is part of the content of the sentences doing the explaining. I describe the nature of partial content and demonstrate how this account of partial content renders Humean explanations ineffective while sparing anti-Humean explanations from the same fate. 1Introduction2Standard Formulations of the Circularity Charge3Humean Responses4Semantic Characterizations of the Circularity Worry 4.1Hempel and Oppenheim’s semantic circularity concern4.2A new version of the semantic circularity charge4.3Partial content as a guide to circularity5Humean Responses to the Semantic Circularity Charge 5.1Smuggling in metaphysics through the back door?5.2Do anti-Humean laws fare any better?5.3The over-generalization concern6ConclusionAppendix. (shrink)

Laws of nature are puzzling because they have a 'modal character'—they seem to be 'necessary-ish'—even though they also seem to be metaphysically contingent. And it is hard to understand how contingent truths could have such a modal character. Scientific essentialism is a doctrine that seems to dissolve this puzzle, by showing that laws of nature are actually metaphysically necessary. I argue that even if the metaphysics of natural kinds and properties offered by scientific essentialism is correct, (...) there are still some metaphysically contingent truths that share the modal character of the laws of nature. I argue that these contingent truths should be considered laws of nature. So even if scientific essentialism is true, at least some laws of nature are metaphysically contingent. (shrink)

It is an underappreciated fact within the philosophical literature on laws of nature that many scientific laws require the aid of a supporting cast of additional modelling ingredients (such as boundary conditions, material parameters, interfacial stipulations, rigidity constraints, and so on) in order to perform their traditional role in scientific inquiry. In this paper, I suggest that this underappreciated fact spells trouble for some recent reformulations of David Lewis's Best Systems Account (BSA) of laws of (...) class='Hi'>nature. Under the auspices of 'pragmatic Humeanism,' several philosophers have recently argued that the criteria of strength and simplicity that lay at the heart of Lewis's original formulation should be replaced with alternatives that are more sensitive to the role that laws play in scientific practice. Although the criteria that these philosophers put forward differ in a variety of ways, they are primarily concerned with the ability of laws to furnish us with predictions and encode information. This, I suggest, is a problem. If it is true that many scientific laws do not on their own perform some of the roles with which they are traditionally associated, then they are unlikely in isolation to make meaningful contributions to the predictive strength of a system or encode information about particular systems. Such laws are thus unlikely to end up in the best system, and so these accounts will have trouble conferring lawhood upon them. (shrink)

Discovering laws of nature was a way to worship a law-giving God, during the Scientific Revolution. So why should we consider it worthwhile now, in our own more secularized science? For historical perspective, I examine two competing early modern theological traditions that related laws of nature to different divine attributes, and their secular legacy in views ranging from Kant and Nietzsche to Humean and ‘governing’ accounts in recent analytic metaphysics. Tracing these branching offshoots of ethically charged (...) God-concepts sheds light on how our ethical ideals and ideas of natural order can still be valuably integrated. Early modern intellectualists valued the law-governed order of nature as a sign of divine Reason. In turn, Reason traditionally ascribed to God has now been partly reclaimed for humans, reframing the value of natural order anthropocentrically, in terms of the value of our own intelligence. Alternatively, Reason may be reclaimed for nature itself, as in an ‘objective’ idealism or metaphysical rationalism. However, beyond divine Reason, an influential voluntarist tradition in theology stressed a connection between laws of nature and God’s Power or free Will. Tracking how divine Power has been reinvested in human beings provides a broader context for instrumentalism and related lineages of empiricism. But secularization can also transfer Power from God to the impersonal natural world. In this light, current scientific interest in lawlike order may also reflect the inherent value of brute necessity or inhuman causal power in nature: this is a deeper way to reject anthropocentrism and to show our respect for the environment. (shrink)

This article explores the connection between Hume’s view of “laws of nature” and his view of miracles by addressing three foci. First, it presents arguments that Hume construed “laws of nature” as merely beliefs in perfect or imperfect causal uniformity. So construed, laws of nature can be violated, so miracles are possible. Second, it shows that Hume’s criteria for evaluating human testimony are found in the popular textbooks of logic of the time. Hume explicitly (...) used these criteria to criticize nonbiblical reports of miracles. Finally, the article shows that Hume took John Tillotson’s examination of transubstantiation to reduce scripture to apostolic testimony and to collapse the distinction between divine and human testimony. This implies that educated Christians entertain inconsistent beliefs. (shrink)

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 the time evolution picture. Thus for proponents of non-Humean approaches to lawhood there is a clear need for a novel non-Humean account which is capable of accommodating these sorts of laws. In this paper we propose such an account, characterizing lawhood in terms of constraints, which are understood as a form of modal structure. We demonstrate that our proposed realist account can indeed accommodate a large variety of laws outside the time evolution paradigm, and describe some possible applications to important philosophical problems. (shrink)

This paper shows how a niche account of the metaphysics of laws of nature and physical properties—the Powers-BSA—can underpin both a sense in which the laws are metaphysically necessary and a sense in which it is true that the laws could have been different. The ability to reconcile entrenched disagreement should count in favour of a philosophical theory, so this paper constitutes a novel argument for the Powers-BSA by showing how it can reconcile disagreement about the (...) laws’ modal status. This paper also constitutes a defence of modal necessitarianism, the interesting and controversial view according to which all worlds are nomologically identical, because it shows how the modal necessitarian can appease the orthodox contingentist about laws. (shrink)

Two criteria are proposed for characterizing the diverse and not yet perspicuous relations between nanotechnology and nature. They assume a concept of nature as that which is not made by human action. One of the criteria endorses a distinction between natural and artificial objects in nanotechnology; the other allows for a discussion of the potential nanotechnological modification of nature. Insofar as current trends may be taken as indicative of future development, nanotechnology might increasingly use the model of (...) nature as a point of orientation, while many of its products will continue to be clearly distinguished from nature. (shrink)

The regularities in nature, simply by being regularities, call for explanation. There are only two ways in which we could, with any plausibility, try to explain them. One way would be to suppose that they are imposed on the world by God. The other would be to suppose that they reflect the presence of laws of nature, conceived of as forms of natural necessity. But the only way of making sense of the notion of a law of (...) nature, thus conceived, is by construing a law as the causing of the associated regularity, and the only remotely plausible account of such causing would be in terms of the agency of God. So, by whichever route, we are led to the conclusion that the regularities are brought about by God. So the presence of the regularities in nature provides us with a strong case for accepting the existence of God. (shrink)

Humeanism about laws of nature is, roughly, the view that the laws of nature are just patterns, or ways of describing patterns, in the mosaic of events. In this paper I survey some of the (many!) objections that have been raised to Humeanism, considering how the Humean might respond. And I consider how we might make a positive case for Humeanism. The common thread running through all this is that the viability of the Humean view relies (...) on the Humean having an importantly different conception of explanation to the anti-Humean. (shrink)

The question of constructing an evolutionary picture of the world based on the results obtained by extending classical mechanics is considered. The expansion of mechanics arose as a result of taking into account the role of the structure of bodies in their dynamics. It is shown that such an extension leads to the possibility of combining branches of physics, in particular, to the substantiation of the laws of thermodynamics, statistical physics, kinetics within the framework of the laws of (...) classical mechanics. It turned out that, according to the laws of classical mechanics, matter is infinitely divisible and can be represented by an infinite hierarchical structure from simple to complex. The expansion showed the existence of universal principles connecting the laws of the upper rung of the hierarchical ladder of matter with the laws of the lower rung. It is considered how they lead to the possibility of constructing a picture of the world based on the fundamental laws of nature. (shrink)

David Lewis's best-system analysis of laws of nature is perhaps the best known sophisticated regularity theory of laws. Its strengths are widely recognized, even by some of its ablest critics. Yet it suffers from what appears to be a glaring weakness: It seems to grant an arbitrary privilege to the standards of our own scientific culture. I argue that by reformulating, or reinterpreting, Lewis's exposition of the best-system analysis, we arrive at a view that is free of (...) this weakness. The resulting theory of laws has the surprising consequence that the term "law of nature" is indexical. (shrink)

First published in 1985, D. M. Armstrong's original work on what laws of nature are has continued to be influential in the areas of metaphysics and philosophy of science. Presenting a definitive attack on the sceptical Humean view, that laws are no more than a regularity of coincidence between stances of properties, Armstrong establishes his own theory and defends it concisely and systematically against objections. Presented in a fresh twenty-first-century series livery, and including a specially commissioned preface (...) written by Marc Lange, illuminating its continuing importance and relevance to philosophical enquiry, this influential work is available for a new generation of readers. (shrink)

It has been said that Robert Boyle gave in the century of The Scientific Revolution the “fullest expression” of the view that laws of nature are continually impressed by God (“occasionalism”). So regarded, the universe is anything but an autonomous machine, its ordered operation depending on God’s continuous imposition of lawful, patterned relations between phenomena and his continuous provision of motion for them to actually enter relations. The present paper contests this treatment of Boyle. Evidence is elicited to (...) show that, for Boyle, most physical relations issue from intrinsic dispositions of phenomena, not divine impositions, dispositions determined by corpuscular textures. Members of classes of phenomena have capacities to make specific changes which members of other classes have capacities to receive, these correlative capacities being necessarily connected, subjects in principle of a priori synthetic necessary knowledge. The same view is found in John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding. It is additionally argued that Boyle’s God, the quintessentially active being, imparted motion at the creation, whereafter the motion of (at least most) natural phenomena has derived from natural, not supernatural, impulsion. (shrink)

The idea that there are ‘laws of nature’ is a widespread scientific opinion. On the one hand, I argue that this idea has the crucial function to explain the obvious similarities of physical processes. On the other hand, I show that this idea can be replaced by the hypothesis supporting that a minimal consciousness immanent to matter governs its processes. This latter hypothesis may seem surprising, but compared to that of laws, it is more empirical in the (...) sense that it is inspired by our conscious experience, in particular our experience of automatic actions. And it is deflationist, because it allows us to reject the existence of laws, which must be considered as Platonistic forms. This hypothesis has been supported by Peirce and Bergson. In this paper, I try to clarify and complete their views, and to draw the consequences for the study of consciousness. (shrink)

Properties have an important role in specifying different views on laws of nature: virtually any position on laws will make some reference to properties, and some of the leading views even reduce laws to properties. This chapter will first outline what laws of nature are typically taken to be and then specify their connection to properties in more detail. We then move on to consider three different accounts of properties: natural, essential, and dispositional properties, (...) and we shall see that different conceptions of properties also result in different views of the modal status of laws, such as the question of whether laws are metaphysically necessary or contingent. Finally, there are also important links specifically between properties, natural kinds, and laws of nature that deserve our attention. (shrink)

The relationship between conceptions of law and conceptions of nature is a complex one, and proceeds on what appear to be two distinct fronts. On the one hand, we frequently talk of nature as being lawlike or as obeying laws. On the other hand there are schools of philosophy that seek to justify ethics generally, or legal theory specifically, in conceptions of nature. Questions about the historical origins and development of claims that nature is lawlike (...) are generally treated as entirely distinct from the development of ethical natural law theories. By looking at the many intersections of law and nature in antiquity, this paper shows that such a sharp distinction is overly simplistic, and often relies crucially on the imposition of an artificial and anachronistic suppression of the role of gods or divinity in the worlds of ancient natural philosophy. Furthermore, by tightening up the terms of the debate, we see that the common claim that a conception of ‘laws of nature’ only emerges in the Scientific Revolution is built on a superficial reading of the ancient evidence.Keywords: Ancient science; Philosophy of science; Philosophy of law; Ancient theology; Scientific Revolution. (shrink)

Although Hobbes talks about the laws of nature as prescribing the virtues, it is easier to think of them as proscribing the vices. The nine vices that are proscribed by the laws of nature are injustice, ingratitude, greed or inhumanity, vindictiveness , cruelty, incivility or contumely, pride, arrogance, and unfairness . The corresponding virtues that are prescribed by the laws of nature are justice, gratitude, humanity or complaisance, mercy, , civility, humility, , modesty, and (...) equity. The difficulty of coming up with names for some of the virtues, and even for some of the vices, shows that they are not all among the most common moral virtues and vices. Nonetheless, as described by Hobbes, they are genuine moral virtues and vices, traits of character such that all impartial rational persons would favor everyone having the virtues and no one having the vices. All of these virtues are such that they benefit everyone impartially by promoting peace, and are not primarily of benefit to the person having them. This is what makes them moral virtues and distinguishes them from the personal virtues of courage, prudence, and temperance. The laws of nature are the dictates "of right reason, conversant about those things which are either to be done or omitted for the constant preservation of life and members, as much as in us lies." But the law of nature "dictating peace, for a means of the conservation of men in multitudes;" is also the moral law because "in the means to peace, [it] commands also good manners, or the practice of virtue; and therefore it is called moral." Hobbes correctly sees both that peace benefits all persons impartially and that impartiality is essential to morality. His account of the moral virtues correctly makes them traits of character that would be favored by all impartial persons. His argument for the rationality of these moral virtues is that one's self-interest, which for Hobbes is primarily one's long-term preservation, is enhanced by having these virtues. There is no incompatibility between morality and self-interest as long as what is in one's own self-interest is equally in the interest of everyone else. Hobbes sees this point quite clearly and it is at the heart of his justification of the moral virtues. (shrink)

In der jüngeren Freiheitsdebatte wird häufig angenommen, dass die libertarische Freiheit, also das So-oder-Anderskönnen unter gegebenen Bedingungen, in einer naturgesetzlich geordneten Welt nicht möglich sei. Im Beitrag wird mit wissenschaftstheoretischen Argumenten die Auffassung verteidigt, dass die libertarische Freiheit allein mit dem Determinismus unvereinbar ist – also nur mit einer philosophischen Doktrin, nicht mit den Naturgesetzen. Letztere fasst man am besten als Restriktionen auf, die einige Möglichkeiten verschließen, andere hingegen offen lassen. -- In recent debates on free will and determinism it (...) is often taken for granted that libertarian freedom cannot exist in a world governed by laws of nature. But this is not what incompatiblism holds. Van Inwagen’s “consequence argument” for incompatibilism says that in a deterministic world, I could have acted otherwise than I did only if I had the miraculous ability either to change the past or to render the laws of nature false. Bringing to bear insights from the philosophy of science, the paper argues that in our world, the laws of physics only constrain what can happen rather than fixing the happenings uniquely. Accordingly, libertarian freedom is not in conflict with a scientific world-view, but only with an untenable metaphysical doctrine, i. e., with Laplacean determinism. (shrink)

This article argues for a revised best system account of laws of nature. David Lewis’s original BSA has two main elements. On the one hand, there is the Humean base, which is the totality of particular matters of fact that obtain in the history of the universe. On the other hand, there is what I call the ‘nomic formula’, which is a particular operation that gets applied to the Humean base in order to output the laws of (...) nature. My revised account focuses on this latter element of the view. Lewis conceives of the nomic formula as a balance of simplicity and strength, but I argue that this is a mistake. Instead, I motivate and develop a different proposal for the standards that figure into the nomic formula, and I suggest a rationale for why these should be the correct standards. Specifically, I argue that the nomic formula should be conceived as a collection of desiderata designed to generate principles that are predictively useful to creatures like us. The resulting view—which I call the ‘best predictive system’ account of laws—is thus able to explain why scientists are interested in discovering the laws, and it also gives rise to laws with the sorts of features that we find in actual scientific practice 1Introduction2The LOPP3A Problem with Lewis's Formula4A Pragmatic Account of the Nomic Formula 4.1Informative dynamics4.2Wide applicability4.3Spatial locality4.4Temporal locality4.5Spatial, temporal, and rotational symmetries4.6Predictively useful properties4.7Simplicity4.8Recap5 Conclusion. (shrink)

David Armstrong accepted the following three theses: universals are immanent, laws are relations between universals, and laws govern. Taken together, they form an attractive position, for they promise to explain regularities in nature—one of the most important desiderata for a theory of laws and properties—while remaining compatible with naturalism. However, I argue that the three theses are incompatible. The basic idea is that each thesis makes an explanatory claim, but the three claims can be shown to (...) run in a problematic circle. I then consider which thesis we ought to reject and suggest some general lessons for the metaphysics of laws. (shrink)

Causation and the laws of nature are nothing over and above the pattern of events, just like a movie is nothing over and above the sequence of frames. Or so I will argue. The position I will argue for is broadly inspired by Hume and Lewis, and may be expressed in the slogan: what must be, must be grounded in what is.

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 brand-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 concept's invention in the seventeenth century. -/- Laws of Nature spans the history of philosophy and of science, contemporary metaphysics, and contemporary philosophy of science. Contents: 1. Intuitions and Assumptions in the Debate over Laws of Nature, Walter Ott and Lydia Patton 2. Early Modern Roots of the Philosophical Concept of a Law of Nature, Helen Hattab 3. Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of Things: Descartes and Newton on Truth in Natural Philosophy, Mary Domski 4. Leges sive natura: Bacon, Spinoza, and a Forgotten Concept of Law, Walter Ott 5. Laws and Powers in the Frame of Nature, Stathis Psillos 6. Laws and Ideal Unity, Angela Breitenbach 7. Becoming Humean, John W. Carroll 8. A Perspectivalist Better Best System Account of Lawhood, Michela Massimi 9. Laws: An Invariance Based Account, James Woodward 10. How the Explanations of Natural Laws Make Some Reducible Physical Properties Natural and Explanatorily Powerful, Marc Lange 11. Laws and their Exceptions, Stephen Mumford 12. Are laws of nature consistent with contingency?, Nancy Cartwright and Pedro Merlussi. (shrink)

John Carroll undertakes a careful philosophical examination of laws of nature, causation, and other related topics. He argues that laws of nature are not susceptible to the sort of philosophical treatment preferred by empiricists. Indeed he shows that emperically pure matters of fact need not even determine what the laws are. Similar, even stronger, conclusions are drawn about causation. Replacing the traditional view of laws and causation requiring some kind of foundational legitimacy, the author (...) argues that these phenomena are inextricably intertwined with everything else. This distinctively clear and detailed discussion of what it is to be a law will be valuable to a broad swathe of philosophers in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of science. (shrink)

Laws of nature are properly (if controversially) conceived as abstract entities playing a governing role in the physical universe. Dispositionalists typically hold that laws of nature are not real, or at least are not fundamental, and that regularities in the physical universe are grounded in the causal powers of objects. By contrast, I argue that dispositionalism implies nomic realism: since at least some dispositions have ceteris paribus clauses incorporating uninstantiated universals, and these ceteris paribus clauses help (...) to determine their dispositions' ranges of manifestation, there are indeed abstracta which play a governing role in the physical universe. After addressing several objections (including the objection that such ‘laws’ lack sufficient independence/externality from the dispositions to count as genuinely governing), I go on to consider some broader implications of this conclusion for other debates in metaphysics and the philosophy of science.1. (shrink)

The prevailing narrative in the history of science maintains that the ancient Greeks did not have a concept of a ‘law of nature’. This paper overturns that narrative and shows that some ancient Greek philosophers did have an idea of laws of nature and, moreover, they referred to them as ‘laws of nature’. This paper analyzes specific examples of laws of nature in texts by Plato, Aristotle, Philo of Alexandria, Nicomachus of Gerasa, and (...) Galen. These examples emerged out of the closely intertwined Platonic and Pythagorean traditions, and these philosophers’ texts make reference to laws of nature when describing arithmetical methods, arithmological doctrines, or medical theories. Nicomachus’ laws of nature are especially noteworthy, because they have features that historians look for in the search for the origin of the modern concept of laws of nature. Nicomachus’ laws of nature are mathematical, universal, and necessary. This paper raises the possibility that the ancient Platonic and Pythagorean traditions influenced the subsequent development of the idea of laws of nature in medieval and early modern Europe, including the conception of laws of nature deployed by Johannes Kepler and Isaac Newton. (shrink)

We critically analyse the point of view for which laws of nature are just a mean to compress data. Discussing some basic notions of dynamical systems and information theory, we show that the idea that the analysis of large amount of data by means of an algorithm of compression is equivalent to the knowledge one can have from scientific laws, is rather naive. In particular we discuss the subtle conceptual topic of the initial conditions of phenomena which (...) are generally incompressible. Starting from this point, we argue that laws of nature represent more than a pure compression of data, and that the availability of large amount of data, in general, is not particularly useful to understand the behaviour of complex phenomena. (shrink)

In this paper, we show that it is not a conceptual truth about laws of nature that they are immutable (though we are happy to leave it as an open empirical question whether they do actually change once in a while). In order to do so, we survey three popular accounts of lawhood—(Armstrong-style) necessitarianism, (Bird-style) dispositionalism and (Lewis-style) ‘best system analysis’—and expose the extent, as well as the philosophical cost, of the amendments that should be enforced in order (...) to leave room for the possibility of changing laws. (shrink)

Both law and science went through revolutionary changes in England in the first half of the seventeenth century, a period of pandemic, conflict, and climate change. The circle of Samuel Hartlib (c. 1600–62) sought a way to regenerate society through reform and innovation. One member of the circle was Sir Cheney Culpeper (1601–66), a barrister and landowner, whose correspondence shows an attempt to synthesize law and natural philosophy into a coherent vision of regeneration. He wrestled as much with how change (...) could be achieved as with what changes would be beneficial. He sought a mutually beneficial relationship between humanity and nature. He urged self-restraint to avoid the abuse of power, political and technological. His most practical and influential work was in agriculture. Paradoxically, however, the efforts of Culpeper and his circle to address the crises of their times have arguably created the very crises of ours. We are, moreover, in what Culpeper describes as a ‘crisis of time’. This essay poses the question as to whether, given the urgency of our situation, we might learn from Culpeper’s generation that regeneration requires revolution as well as reform. (shrink)

The belief that laws of nature are contingent played an important role in the emergence of the empirical method of modern physics. During the scientific revolution, this belief was based on the idea of voluntary creation. Taking up Peter Mittelstaedt’s work on laws of nature, this article explores several alternative answers which do not overtly make use of metaphysics: some laws are laws of mathematics; macroscopic laws can emerge from the interplay of numerous (...) subsystems without any specific microscopic nomic structures (John Wheeler’s “law without law”); laws are the preconditions of scientific experience (Kant); laws are theoretical abstractions which only apply in very limited circumstances (Nancy Cartwright). Whereas Cartwright’s approach is in tension with modern scientific methodology, the first three strategies count as illuminating, though partial answers. It is important for the empirical method of modern physics that these three strategies, even when taken together, do not provide a complete explanation of the order of nature. Thus the question of why laws are valid is still relevant. In the concluding section, I argue that the traditional answer, based on voluntary creation, provides the right balance of contingency and coherence which is in harmony with modern scientific method. (shrink)

Hume defined ‘cause’ three times over. The two principal definitions (constant conjunction, felt determination) provide the anchors for the two main strands of the modem empiricist accounts of laws of nature 1 while the third (the counter factual definition 2) may be seen as the inspiration of the nonHumean necessitarian analyses. Corresponding to the felt determination definition is the account of laws that emphasizes human attitudes, beliefs, and actions. Latter day weavers of this strand include Nelson Goodman, (...) A. J. Ayer, and Nicholas Rescher. In Fact, Fiction and Forecast Goodman writes: “I want to emphasize the Humean idea that rather than a sentence being used for prediction because it is a law, it is called a law because it is used for prediction” (1955, p. 62). In “What is a law of nature?”, Ayer explains that the difference between ‘generalizations of fact’ and ‘generalizations of law’ “lies not so much on the side of facts which make them true, as in the attitude of those who put them forward” (1956, p. 162). And in a similar vein, Rescher maintains that lawfulness is “mind-dependent”; it is not something which is discovered but which is supplied: “Lawfulness is not found in or extracted from the evidence but superadded to it. Lawfulness is a matter of imputation” (1970, p. 107). By contrast, the constant conjunction definition promotes the view that laws are to be analyzed in terms of the de re characteristics of regularities, independently of the attitudes and actions of actual or potential knowers. (shrink)

One of the main arguments against interventionist views of special divine action is that God would not violate his own laws. But if intervention entails the breaking of natural law, what precisely is being broken? While the nature of the laws of nature has been widely explored by philosophers of science, important distinctions are often ignored in the science and religion literature. In this paper, I consider the three main approaches to laws: Humean anti-realism, supervenience (...) on more fundamental aspects of metaphysics, and nomological realism. The first denies that there is any metaphysical reality behind laws or causation. The second holds that laws supervene on capacities, dispositions, or counterfactuals. The third takes laws to be irreducible aspects of reality. The mechanics of special divine action and worries about intervention vary depending on which view of law one holds. In the end, I argue that early modern natural philosophers, who first introduced law-language for nature, largely had it right. Laws are not created entities or powers that act as intermediaries between God and nature; they are best understood as expressions of God’s will for nature. The outstanding question is whether such a view inevitably lands in occasionalism. (shrink)

In this article the author proposes "to state the problem (of explanatory propositions) by defining and discussing the requirements for a satisfactory account of the laws of nature, In a somewhat narrow sense of the term which does not include probability statements and statistical propositions; next to examine two mutually exclusive theories and their common assumptions; finally to suggest and try to justify a solution to the problem." (staff).

The focus of my dissertation is a general and comprehensive examination of Locke’s view of divine power. My basic argument is that John Locke is a theological voluntarist in his understanding of God’s creative and providential relationship with the world, including both the natural and moral order. As a voluntarist, Locke holds that God freely imposes both the physical and moral laws of nature onto creation by means of his will: this contrasts with the intellectualist perspective in which (...) the laws of nature emerge from the essences of things. For Locke, there are no intrinsically necessary laws in the created order: both physical and moral laws are arbitrary determinations of the divine will. While these laws are not intrinsically necessary, they are hypothetically necessary. Hypothetical necessity involves things that could have been otherwise, but which are necessary based on the supposition of a free action and other relevant conditions pertaining to the actor. Concerning God, we can understand hypothetical necessity in the following way: □ [ → Y]. X is a variable that ranges over a subset of contingent propositions about actions. ‘P’ is the proposition ‘God is perfect’. And Y is any proposition that is a necessary consequent of both X and P. In any possible world in which God performs X, it is the case that Y will obtain. Supposing that God decides to create beings like us, God must of necessity craft the moral laws of nature in a way that harmonizes with our nature. What grounds this necessity is that God must act consistently with the perfection of the divine nature: to give us a different law would be less than perfect. Furthermore, I argue that certain physical laws of nature – those that help to realize our nature – are also hypothetically necessary. (shrink)