Readership: Advanced students and scholars of philosophy, particularly those with an interest in metaphysics and philosophy of science.
Alexander Bird, University of Bristol
"no one has yet elaborated and defended with so much subtlety, rigour, and depth the exciting new metaphysics of nature that replaces both versions of the traditional categoricalist picture of nature...Reading Bird is highly rewarding: he sheds new light on many problems by analysing them in a new way...Bird's book holds promise to become the authoritative statement of the new dispositionalist metaphysics." - Max Kistler, Mind
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
