Readership: Advanced students and scholars of philosophy, particularly those with an interest in metaphysics and philosophy of science
Alexander Bird, University of Bristol
"Alexander Bird has done an excellent job in injecting argumentative rigour into a debate that has come to seem to some as having reached stalemate.... The sheer weight and quality of argument in this book show that this is a debate that has a long way to run yet." - Helen Beebee, Times Literary Supplement
"This is a rewarding book. In terms of area, it has one foot firmly planted in metaphysics and the other just as firmly set in the philosophy of science. Nature's Metaphysics is distinctive for its thorough and detailed defense of fundamental, natural properties as essentially dispositional and for its description of how these dispositional properties are thus suited to sustain the laws of nature as (metaphysically) necessary truths." - John W. Carroll, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
1: Introduction - laws and properties 2: Dispositions 3: Dispositional essentialism and the laws of nature 4: Categoricalism 5: Dispositional essentialism, modality, and intentionality 6: The regress objection 7: Structural properties 8: The illusion of nomic contingency 9: Are there any laws, and if so what are they? 10: Concluding remarks References
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