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The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism

In this review, I specify the metametaphysical background in which Alastair Wilson’s “ The Nature of Contingency ” (Oxford University Press, 2020) should be properly understood. Metaphysics, as a…
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Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist Canon

An alternative anti-Humean account of properties and laws is presented that can overcome an explanatory shortcoming of CDE and achieves a level of continuity with science that CDE fails to achieve and a significant narrowing of the range of possibilities in which the absolutely best unified account of laws and properties resides.
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Necessary Laws and the Problem of Counterlegals

Substantive counterlegal discourse poses a problem for those according to whom the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. I discern two types of necessitarianism about laws: dispositional…
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Can Hardcore Actualism Validate S5?

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Humean Laws in an unHumean World

ABSTRACT: I argue that an unHumean ontology of irreducibly dispositional properties might be fruitfully combined with what has typically been thought of as a Humean account of laws, namely, the…
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Common ground for laws and metaphysical modality

Hardcore Actualism and Possible Non‐Existence

According to hardcore actualism (HA), all modal truths are grounded in the concrete constituents of the actual world. In this paper, I discuss some problems faced by HA when it comes to accounting…
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LAWS OF NATURE: NECESSARY AND CONTINGENT

This paper shows how a niche account of the metaphysics of laws of nature and physical properties—the Powers-BSA—can underpin both a sense in which the laws are metaphysically necessary and a sense…

Pandispositionalism and the metaphysics of powers

Some philosophers maintain that physical properties are irreducibly modal: that properties are powers. Powers are then employed to provide explanations of other phenomena of philosophical interest…
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Correction to: Reconsidering the dispositional essentialist canon

A correction to this paper has been published: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11098-021-01620-5
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