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73Causation and the sciencesIn Steven French & Juha Saatsi (eds.), Continuum Companion to the Philosophy of Science, Continuum. pp. 96--119. 2011.
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67The Large-Scale Joints of the WorldHumana Mente 4 (19). 2011.What is the compositional structure of reality? That question divides naturally into these two: What is the compositional structure of the particulars that populate reality? And what is the structure of the properties and relations that fix what these entities are like? David Lewis‘s work in ontology and mereology provides the materials for an extraordinarily clean answer to the first question. First, among the particulars1 that populate reality are mereological simples: entities that have no pr…Read more
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52Review of Wesley C. salmon, Phil Dowe (ed.), Merrilee H. salmon (ed.), Reality and Rationality (review)Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews 2007 (1). 2007.
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37Review of Causality and Explanation by Wesley C. Salmon (review)Philosophy of Science 66 (3): 497-498. 1999.
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24Humean Reductionism about Laws of NatureIn Barry Loewer & Jonathan Schaffer (eds.), A Companion to David Lewis, Wiley. 2015.This chapter investigates the prospects for an important position that falls under the "mere patterns" approach: what, for reasons that will emerge, the author calls"Humean reductionism" about laws of nature, a view championed perhaps most prominently by David Lewis. He reviews some of the most interesting arguments against this position from the literature, and adds some of his own that, he thinks, are more effective. The chapter considers how the best system account (BSA) would apply to the Ne…Read more
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11Causation and PreemptionIn Peter Clark & Katherine Hawley (eds.), Philosophy of science today, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 100-130. 2003.Causation is a deeply intuitive and familiar relation, gripped powerfully by common sense. Or so it seems. As is typical in philosophy, however, that deep intuitive familiarity has not led to any philosophical account of causation that is at once clean, precise, and widely agreed upon. Not for lack of trying: the last thirty years or so have seen dozens of attempts to provide such an account, and the pace of development is, if anything, accelerating. (See Collins et al. [2003a] for a comprehensi…Read more
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2CausationIn Frank Jackson & Michael Smith (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Contemporary Philosophy, Oxford University Press. 2003.
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1Part V. Is chance ontologically fundamental?: Chance and the great divideIn Shamik Dasgupta, Brad Weslake & Ravit Dotan (eds.), Current Controversies in Philosophy of Science, Routledge. 2020.
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Humean Reductionism about EssenceIn Christian Loew, Siegfried Jaag & Michael Townsen Hicks (eds.), Humean Laws for Human Agents, Oxford Up. pp. 258-286. 2023.In the metaphysics of laws of nature, one fundamental philosophical question is whether we should give a metaphysical or rather an epistemic account of what they are; that is the core issue that divides ‘Humeans’ from ‘anti-Humeans’. In much the same way, a key question we face with essences is whether to give a metaphysical or rather an epistemic account of what they are. (So note well: in choosing to deploy the term ‘essence’ this chapter is not taking sides on the ‘Go metaphysical, or go epis…Read more
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The Intrinsic Character of CausationIn Dean Zimmerman (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 1, Oxford University Press Uk. 2004.
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Physical and metaphysical modalityIn Otávio Bueno & Scott A. Shalkowski (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Modality, Routledge. 2018.
Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States of America
Areas of Specialization
Epistemology |
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
Philosophy of Probability |
General Philosophy of Science |