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This book concerns the nature of time. It shows how presentism, the view that only the present exists, can be defended. Part I of the book shows how presentism is the only viable alternative to the tenseless theory of time. It then develops a framework for solving problems traditionally associated with the position, such as finding truthmakers for past‐tensed statements; McTaggart's argument; the need for other times other than the present time; how to give the proper semantics for future contingent statements; how to deal with transtemporal relations between the past and the present; how we can meaningfully talk about past individuals; and how accounts of causation relations can be formulated. Part I concludes with a discussion of the direction of time and causation, the decision‐theoretic problem known as ‘Newcomb's problem’, and the possibility of time travel and causal loops. Part II focuses on the problems for presentism raised by relativity theory. It begins by giving a self‐contained exposition of the concepts of special relativity and its philosophical implications. The last two chapters focus on certain cosmological models of general relativity: namely, the expanding universes, and Gödel's infamous model. The necessary physics is explained, with the aid of diagrams.

John McDowell’s attempt to revive the doctrine of empiricism in a ‘minimal’ or ‘transcendental’ form is seriously undermined by inadequacies in the way he conceives what he styles the ‘order of justification’ connecting world, experience, and judgement. For example, his conception of the roles played by causation and nature in this order is threatened with vacuity. The requirements of self-consciousness and verbal articulacy which he places on subjects participating in the justificatory relation between experience and judgement are unwarranted, and have the implausible consequence that infants and non-human animals are excluded from the ‘order of justification’, and thus deprived of experience of the world. Above all, McDowell’s position is vitiated by a substantial error he commits in the philosophy of language: following ancient tradition rather than Frege’s radical departure from that tradition, he locates concepts at the level of sense rather than at the level of reference in the semantical hierarchy. This error generates an unwanted Kantian transcendental idealism which in effect delivers a reductio ad absurdum of McDowell’s metaphysical economy. To correct this mistake, Frege must first be followed in his location of concepts at the level of reference. Second, one must move beyond Frege to locate not only concepts but also propositions at that level. This, in turn, requires the serious consideration of an idea which McDowell mentions only to reject, that of objects as speaking to us ‘in the world’s own language’. Despite the correction recommended here, if empiricism is to have any chance of success, it must be still more minimal in its pretensions than McDowell allows. In particular, it must abandon the individualistic and intellectualistic construction which McDowell places on the ‘order of justification’.

Hume talks of our ‘gilding and staining’ natural objects, and of the mind's propensity to ‘spread itself’ on the world. This has led commentators to use the metaphor of ‘projection’ in connection with his philosophy. This book spells out its meaning, the role it plays in Hume's work, and examines how, if at all, what sounds ‘projective’ in Hume can be reconciled with what sounds ‘realist’. In addition to offering some original readings of Hume's central ideas on God and the Self among other things, this book offers a detailed examination of the notion of projection and the problems it faces.

What fundamental account of the world is implicit in physical theory? Physics straightforwardly postulates quarks and electrons, but what of the more intangible elements, such as laws of nature, universals, and the direction of time? Do they have a place in the physical structure of the world? This book argues that the ontology derived from physics takes a form quite different from those most commonly defended by philosophers. Physics postulates irreducible fundamental laws, eschews universals, does not require a fundamental notion of causation, and makes room for the passage of time. The book contains a series of linked essays in the form of chapters and through them it outlines an approach to metaphysics opposed to the Humean reductionism that motivates much analytical metaphysics.

This book provides an introduction to, and analysis of, the use of Bayesian nets in causal modelling. It puts forward new conceptual foundations for causal network modelling: The book argues that probability and causality need to be interpreted as epistemic notions in order for the key assumptions behind causal models to hold. Under the epistemic view, probability and causality are understood in terms of the beliefs an agent ought to adopt. The book develops an objective Bayesian notion of probability and a corresponding epistemic theory of causality. This yields a general framework for causal modelling, which is extended to cope with recursive causal relations, logically complex beliefs and changes in an agent's language.

Blighted and accursed families are an inescapable feature of Greek tragedy, and many scholars have treated the questions of inherited guilt, curses, and divine causation. This book gives these familiar issues a fresh appraisal, arguing that tragedy is a medium that fuses the conceptual with the provoking and exciting of emotion, neither of which can be ignored if the texts are to be fully understood. It pays particular attention to Aeschylus' Seven against Thebes and the Phoenician Women of Euripides, both of which dramatize the sorrows of the later generations of the House of Oedipus, but in very different, and perhaps complementary, ways. All Greek quotations are translated.

This book proposes a theory of analogical arguments, with special focus on analogies in mathematics and science. The core principle of the theory is that a good analogical argument must articulate a clear relationship capable of generalization. This idea leads to a set of distinct models for the critical analysis of prominent forms of analogical argument, corresponding to different logical, causal and probabilistic relationships that occur in scientific reasoning. The same principle allows us to relate analogical reasoning to broad norms and values of scientific practice, such as symmetry and unification. Elaborating this principle, the book raises questions and proposes answers regarding (1) criteria for evaluating analogical arguments, (2) the philosophical justification for analogical reasoning, and (3) the place of scientific analogies in the context of theoretical confirmation.

This book has two Parts. Part I prepares the ground for this theory of rational free action by seeking to undermine the threat that physicalism presents to it. This it does this by challenging the cogency of the causal closure argument for physicalism in all of its forms. It shows that a dualistic philosophy of mind — one which holds that human mental states and their subjects cannot simply be identified with bodily states and human bodies respectively — is both metaphysically coherent and entirely consistent with known empirical facts concerning mental causation and causation in the physical domain. Part II defends a middle path between classical agent causalism and volitionism. It accords to volitions the status of basic actions, maintains that these are free and spontaneous exercises of the two-way power of the will, performed in the light of reason, and contends that agents are the causal source of all change in the world — with rational, free agents like ourselves having a special place in the causal order as unmoved movers, or initiators of new causal chains. Rather than accepting the notion of event causation as perfectly legitimate in the inanimate domain and representing agent causation as a sui generis phenomenon restricted to rational beings, in which an agent as such is a cause, it holds that all causation is causation by agents, but that agents can only cause things to happen by acting in suitable ways. And it says that what is special about rational agents is that they possess a distinctively rational power — the power of will or choice. It also defends a thoroughgoing externalism regarding reasons for action, holding these to be mind-independent worldly entities rather than the beliefs and desires of agents.

This book presents a collection of twelve essays which together constitute a modern-day examination of Cartesian themes in the metaphysics of mind. The book offers penetrating discussions of such topics as the relation between the mental and the physical, mental causation, the possibility of disembodied existence, the relation between conceivability and possibility, varieties of necessity, and issues in the theory of content arising out of the foregoing. The collection represents almost all of this book's author's work on these topics, and features one previously unpublished piece.

This book is a systematic study of Descartes's theory of causation and its relation to the medieval and early modern scholastic philosophy that provides its proper historical context. The argument here is that even though Descartes offered a dualistic ontology that differs radically from what we find in scholasticism, his views on causation were profoundly influenced by scholastic thought on this issue. This influence is evident not only in his affirmation in the Meditations of the abstract scholastic axiom that a cause must contain the reality of its effects, but also in the details of the accounts of body‐body interactions in his physics, of mind‐body interaction in his psychology, and of the causation that he took to be involved in free human action. In contrast to those who have read Descartes as endorsing the “occasionalist” conclusion that God is the only real cause, a central thesis of this study is that he accepted what in the context of scholastic debates regarding causation is the antipode of occasionalism, namely, the view that creatures rather than God are the causal source of natural change. What emerges from the defense of this interpretation of Descartes is a new understanding of his contribution to modern thought on causation.

The book is a new edition of Eternal God first published in 1988, and contains four new chapters. It offers a defence of divine timeless eternity. After sketching the nature of such eternity in the first two chapters, a number of philosophical objections are considered, such as the argument from personality and from the incompatibility of divine eternity and indexical knowledge. A number of standard objections are discussed, and the account is further developed in the light of these. Among them are the nature of an eternal God's foreknowledge of what happens in time, and its relation to human choice, and how and in what manner such divine foreknowledge differs from fatalism. This leads to a consideration of foreknowledge and human responsibility, the sense in which timeless divine choice is free, and how it is possible to refer to an eternal God. The first of the final four new chapters explores the view of W. L. Craig that God is timeless sans creation but temporal thereafter. This leads to a consideration of timelessness and causation, in connection with creation, and then the importance of the distinction between a timeless God's perspective on his creation and those of agents in time. Assuming that God is triune, the final chapter discusses the relation between the three persons of the divine, first if God is considered to be in time, and then if he is eternal.

This book is a collection of essays on the problem of causation in seventeenth-century philosophy. Occasionalism is the doctrine, held by a number of early modern Cartesian thinkers, that created substances are devoid of any true causal powers, and that God is the only real causal agent in the universe. All natural phenomena have God as their direct and immediate cause, with natural things and their states serving only as “occasions” for God to act. Rather than being merely an ad hoc, deus ex machina response to the mind-body problem bequeathed by Descartes to his followers (especially Malebranche, Cordemoy, and La Forge), as it has often been portrayed in the past, occasionalism is in fact a full-blooded, complex, and philosophically interesting account of causal relations. These essays examine the philosophical, scientific, theological, and religious themes and arguments of occasionalism, as well as its roots in medieval views on God and causality.

This book contains a collection of twelve metaphysical chapters that address a range of first-order topics, including identity, coincidence, essence, causation, and properties. Some first-order debates are not worth pursuing, the book argues; there is nothing at issue in them. Several of the chapters explore the metaontology of abstract objects, and more generally of objects that are ‘preconceived’, their principal features being settled already by their job-descriptions. The book rejects standard forms of fictionalism, opting ultimately for a view that puts presupposition in the role normally played by pretense.

Some philosophers think physical explanations stand on their own: what happens, happens because things have the properties they do. Others think that any such explanation is incomplete: what happens in the physical world must be partly due to the laws of nature. This book follows the debate between these views from Descartes to Hume. The book argues that the competing models of causation in the period grow out of the scholastic notion of power. On this Aristotelian view, the connection between cause and effect is logically necessary. Causes are “intrinsically directed” at what they produce. But when the Aristotelian view is faced with the challenge of mechanism, the core notion of a power splits into two distinct models, each of which persists throughout the early modern period. It is only when seen in this light that the key arguments of the period can reveal their true virtues and flaws. To make this case, the book explores such central topics as intentionality, the varieties of necessity, and the nature of relations. Arguing for controversial readings of many of the canonical figures, the book also focuses on lesser‐known writers such as Pierre‐Sylvain Régis, Nicolas Malebranche, and Robert Boyle.

This book engages with major philosophical questions concerning time and space — a framework for the investigation being provided by the debate between the absolutists and the relationists, so between Newton and Leibniz, and their followers. The investigation brings to the fore questions of the nature and reality of time and space, and leads on to more recent debates, as those relating to their possible infinitude, to anti-realism, time travel, temporal parts, geometry, convention, and the direction of time. These in turn raise more general issues, issues involving such concepts as those of identity, objectivity, causation, facts, and verifiability. Their examination falls within metaphysics, thought of as the investigation and analysis of fundamental philosophical concepts, but there is also metaphysics of a more contentious character, where the subject-matter is provided by propositions which transcend what can be known either through experience or by pure reasoning. In this connection, a central aim is to show how, without dismissing them as nonsensical, we may arrive at a fruitful interpretation of such propositions. While the focus of the work is not primarily on issues which presume an understanding of physical theory, it is hoped that the arguments developed will throw some light on relevant scientific concerns.