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Explanatory Abstraction and the Goldilocks Problem: Interventionism Gets Things Just RightBritish Journal for the Philosophy of Science 71 (2): 633-663. 2020.Theories of explanation need to account for a puzzling feature of our explanatory practices: the fact that we prefer explanations that are relatively abstract but only moderately so. Contra Franklin-Hall ([2016]), I argue that the interventionist account of explanation provides a natural and elegant explanation of this fact. By striking the right balance between specificity and generality, moderately abstract explanations optimally subserve what interventionists regard as the goal of explan…Read more
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Causation: A User’s GuideOxford University Press UK. 2013.Causation is at once familiar and mysterious. Neither common sense nor extensive philosophical debate has led us to anything like agreement on the correct analysis of the concept of causation, or an account of the metaphysical nature of the causal relation. Causation: A User's Guide cuts a clear path through this confusing but vital landscape. L. A. Paul and Ned Hall guide the reader through the most important philosophical treatments of causation, negotiating the terrain by taking a set of exam…Read more
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Agents’ AbilitiesDe Gruyter. 2020.In the book, I provide an account of what it is for an agent to have an ability. According to the Success View, abilities are all about success across possible situations. In developing and applying the view, the book elucidates the relation between abilities on the one hand and possibility, counterfactuals, and dispositions on the other; it sheds light on the distinction between general and specific abilities; it offers an understanding of degrees of abilities; it explains which role intentions…Read more
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A puzzle about laws and explanationSynthese 199 (3-4): 6085-6102. 2021.In this paper, we argue that the popular claim that laws of nature explain their instances creates a philosophical puzzle when it is combined with the widely held requirement that explanations need to be underpinned by ‘wordly’ relations. We argue that a “direct solution” to the puzzle that accounts for both explanatory laws and explanatory realism requires endorsing at least a radical metaphysics. Then, we examine the ramifications of a “skeptical solution”, i.e., dissolving it by giving up at …Read more
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Dispositional essentialism and the grounding of natural modalityPhilosophers' Imprint 14. 2014.
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Why Free Will is Real, by Christian ListMind 130 (519): 987-996. 2021.
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Nomothetic Explanation and Humeanism about Laws of NatureIn Karen Bennett & Dean W. Zimmerman (eds.), Oxford Studies in Metaphysics Volume 12, Oxford University Press. 2020.Humeanism about laws of nature — the view that the laws reduce to the Humean mosaic — is a popular view, but currently existing versions face powerful objections. The non-supervenience objection, the non-fundamentality objection and the explanatory circularity objection have all been thought to cause problems for the Humean. However, these objections share a guiding thought — they are all based on the idea that there is a certain kind of divergence between the practice of science and the metaphy…Read more
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Umeå UniversityAssociate Professor
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Umeå, Sweden
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Physical Science |
Philosophy of Action |