Hugh Mellor

(1938 - 2020)

Mind, Meaning, and Reality contains fifteen philosophical papers by D. H. Mellor. The first Part is about how the ways we are disposed to act fix both what we believe and what we use language to mean. Part II is about what there is: the reality of dispositions; what makes beliefs and sentences true; why there is only one universe; and how social groups, and other things composed of parts, are related to the people and other things that constitute them. Part III is about time, and includes discussions of twentieth century developments in the philosophy of time; why Kant was right about tense, even though he was wrong about time; why forward time travel is trivial and backward time travel impossible; and what gives time its direction.

Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. _The Facts of Causation_, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and our place in it without understanding causation. Yet a complete account of the nature and implications of causation does not exist. D.H Mellor's new book is that account.

Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. _The Facts of Causation_, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and our place in it without understanding causation. Yet a complete account of the nature and implications of causation does not exist. D.H Mellor's new book is that account.

Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. _The Facts of Causation_, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and our place in it without understanding causation. Yet a complete account of the nature and implications of causation does not exist. D.H Mellor's new book is that account.

The two other commentators, being, like Professor Laudan, scholars, have commented on the whole of his book. As a mere philosopher, I may perhaps be forgiven if I get little further than the first chapter of Progress and Its Problems.We know that the practice of science increases our knowledge and understanding of things and events, and consequently our capacity to predict and control them. That is why the practice of science interests philosophers who are concerned to say how such knowledge and understanding, such capacity for prediction and control, can be acquired. It challenges them to show why scientific practice should deliver these cognitive goods. Some who decline the challenge, or fail to meet it, may deny that it does deliver the goods; but their conscious practice, of preferring aircraft to broomsticks for flight and telephones to telepathy for communication, belies the sincerity of their denials.

This selection of D. H. Mellor's work demonstrates the wide ranging originality of his work. It gathers together sixteen major papers on related topics. Together they form a complete modern metaphysics. The first five papers are on aspects of the mind: on our 'selves', their supposed subjectivity and how we refer to them, on the nature of conscious belief and on computational and physicalist theories of the mind. The next five papers deal with dispositions, natural kinds, laws of nature and how they involve natural necessity, universals and objective chances, and the relation between properties and predicates. Then follow three papers about the relations between time, change and causation, the nature of individual causes and effects and of the causal relation between them, and how causation depends on chance. The last three papers discuss the relation between chance and degrees of belief, give a solution to the problem of induction, and argue for an objective interpretation of decision theory.

I dispute a widespread contrast between the sciences and the humanities that undervalues the latter compared to the former. This contrast assumes that science is more valuable than the humanities because it is more useful, an assumption I reject on the grounds that science is not more useful than the humanities and the value of usefulness, being instrumental, depends on the non-instrumental value of what it's usefulness for. I conclude that science is not made more valuable than the humanities either by its instrumental or by its non-instrumental value.