Andreas Hüttemann

Die Untersuchung besteht aus drei Teilen. Im ersten Teil argumentiere ich, daß in der frühen Neuzeit durch die Zurückweisung des scholastischen Vokabulars das Problem, Ordnung und Regelmäßigkeit in der Natur zu erklären, neu aufgeworfen wird. Descartes führt den Begriff des Naturgesetzes ein, um dieses Problem zu lösen. Im zweiten und dritten Teil analysiere ich, was Descartes unter einem Naturgesetz versteht. Im zweiten Teil zeige ich, daß es für die verbreitete Auffassung, Descartes halte Naturgesetze für ewige Wahrheiten, keine guten Gründe gibt. Im dritten Teil untersuche ich die Rolle, die Gott – Descartes zufolge – als Urheber der Naturgesetze spielt. Ich argumentiere, daß die “Daumenkino”-Auffassung von Naturgesetzen keine Folge der “creatio continua”- These ist, sondern eine Konsequenz des Cartesischen Materiebegriffs. Schließlich bemühe ich mich verständlich zu machen, weshalb Descartes fürchtet, seine Naturgesetzauffassung lege die Hypothese nahe, Gott sei die Weltseele

Laws of nature take center stage in philosophy of science. Laws are usually believed to stand in a tight conceptual relation to many important key concepts such as causation, explanation, confirmation, determinism, counterfactuals etc. Traditionally, philosophers of science have focused on physical laws, which were taken to be at least true, universal statements that support counterfactual claims. But, although this claim about laws might be true with respect to physics, laws in the special sciences (such as biology, psychology, economics etc.) appear to have—maybe not surprisingly—different features than the laws of physics. Special science laws—for instance, the economic law “Under the condition of perfect competition, an increase of demand of a commodity leads to an increase of price, given that the quantity of the supplied commodity remains constant” and, in biology, Mendel's Laws—are usually taken to “have exceptions”, to be “non-universal” or “to be ceteris paribus laws”. How and whether the laws of physics and the laws of the special sciences differ is one of the crucial questions motivating the debate on ceteris paribus laws. Another major, controversial question concerns the determination of the precise meaning of “ceteris paribus”. Philosophers have attempted to explicate the meaning of ceteris paribus clauses in different ways. The question of meaning is connected to the problem of empirical content, i.e., the question whether ceteris paribus laws have non-trivial and empirically testable content. Since many philosophers have argued that ceteris paribus laws lack empirically testable content, this problem constitutes a major challenge to a theory of ceteris paribus laws.

John Earman and John T. Roberts advocate a challenging and radical claim regarding the semantics of laws in the special sciences: the statistical account. According to this account, a typical special science law “asserts a certain precisely defined statistical relation among well-defined variables” and this statistical relation does not require being hedged by ceteris paribus conditions. In this paper, we raise two objections against the attempt to cash out the content of special science generalizations in statistical terms.

We take the potentialities that are studied in the biological sciences (e.g., totipotency) to be an important subtype of biological dispositions. The goal of this paper is twofold: first, we want to provide a detailed understanding of what biological dispositions are. We claim that two features are essential for dispositions in biology: the importance of the manifestation process and the diversity of conditions that need to be satisfied for the disposition to be manifest. Second, we demonstrate that the concept of a disposition (or potentiality) is a very useful tool for the analysis of the explanatory practice in the biological sciences. On the one hand it allows an in-depth analysis of the nature and diversity of the conditions under which biological systems display specific behaviors. On the other hand the concept of a disposition may serve a unificatory role in the philosophy of the natural sciences since it captures not only the explanatory practice of biology, but of all natural sciences. Towards the end we will briefly come back to the notion of a potentiality in biology.

Descartes spent over 30 years commenting on the phenomenon of gravity. His attempts to explain gravity in his early private notes, his early letters up to the writing of Le Monde are subject to a clear development. This development is not merely of interest in the history of science, but also promises to shed light on those reasons that led him to reject the scholastic terminology on which he had based his early explanations. This is especially true of the concept of real quality, which is central in this context. It will be seen that Descartes justified his rejection of this concept at different times with quite different arguments. In doing so, I would like to correct a view that is sometimes suggested, if not explicitly put forward, in studies of Descartes' relationship to the scholastic vocabulary: Descartes rejected this vocabulary because of ontological reservations. This misinterpretation also seems to me to underlie Gilson's investigation. To illustrate the development of Descartes' attitude towards traditional ontological terminology, I will first consider the early statements in which Descartes conceives of gravity as a real quality. In a second step, I will examine the period around 1630, when Descartes arrived at a mechanistic conception of gravity. What were the reasons for Descartes abandoning his old conception? In a third step, I will look at the statements from the 1940s in which Descartes discusses gravity as an example of a real quality, a category that no longer has a place in his ontological considerations.

Statistical mechanics attempts to explain the behaviour of macroscopic physical systems in terms of the mechanical properties of their constituents. Although it is one of the fundamental theories of physics, it has received little attention from philosophers of science. Nevertheless, it raises philosophical questions of fundamental importance on the nature of time, chance and reduction. Most philosophical issues in this domain relate to the question of the reduction of thermodynamics to statistical mechanics. This book addresses issues inherent in this reduction: the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and its absence in statistical mechanics; the role and essential nature of chance and probability in this reduction when thermodynamics is non-probabilistic; and how, if at all, the reduction is possible. Compiling contributions on current research by experts in the field, this is an invaluable survey of the philosophy of statistical mechanics for academic researchers and graduate students interested in the foundations of physics.

Many biologists and philosophers have worried that importing models of reasoning from the physical sciences obscures our understanding of reasoning in the life sciences. In this paper we discuss one example that partially validates this concern: part-whole reductive explanations. Biology and physics tend to incorporate different models of temporality in part-whole reductive explanations. This results from differential emphases on compositional and causal facets of reductive explanations, which have not been distinguished reliably in prior philosophical analyses. Keeping these two facets distinct facilitates the identifi cation of two further aspects of reductive explanation: intrinsicality and fundamentality. Our account provides resources for discriminating between different types of reductive explanation and suggests a new approach to comprehending similarities and differences in the explanatory reasoning found in biology and physics.

'Microphysicalism', the view that whole objects behave the way they do in virtue of the behaviour of their constituent parts, is an influential contemporary view with a long philosophical and scientific heritage. In _What's Wrong With Microphysicalism?_ Andreas Hüttemann offers a fresh challenge to this view. Hüttemann agrees with the microphysicalists that we can explain compound systems by explaining their parts, but claims that this does not entail a fundamentalism that gives hegemony to the micro-level. At most, it shows that there is a relationship of determination between parts and wholes, but there is no justification for taking this relationship to be asymmetrical rather than one of mutual dependence. Hüttemann argues that if this is the case, then microphysicalists have no right to claim that the micro-level is the ultimate agent: neither the parts nor the whole have 'ontological priority'. Hüttemann advocates a pragmatic pluralism, allowing for different ways to describe nature. _What's Wrong With Microphysicalism?_ is a convincing and original contribution to central issues in contemporary philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and metaphysics.

It is my aim in this paper to look at some of the arguments that are brought forward for or against certain claims to unity/disunity (in particular to examine those arguments from science and from scientific practice) in order to evaluate whether they really show what they claim to. This presupposes that the concept or rather the concepts of the unity of physics are reasonably clear. Three concepts of unity can be identified: (1) ontological unity, which refers to the objects physics is about; (2) descriptive unity, which addresses the descriptive devices physics employs in dealing with physical systems (3) unity of practice, which deals with what physicists actually do.