I loved this book. It’s not an easy read, but it’s deeply rewarding – an important monograph and a useful reference, all in one. Its 2008 Lakatos Prize was well-earned. Gauging What’s Real is also a book that metaphysicians should take notice of, because it overlaps with – and often challenges – much of the literature on natural properties and Humean supervenience. But noticing Healey’s book is...

When it comes to predicting the evolution of physical systems, there seem to be two mathematically equivalent, but conceptually distinct kinds of what we might call ‘fundamental laws’: there are those laws we are most used to talking about – Newtonianstyle laws whereby we can take the state of a system at a time, t, apply the relevant laws of nature, and predict the state of the system at time ...

In the contemporary expanding literature on transmission failure and its connections with issues such as the Closure Principle, the nature of perceptual warrant, Moore’s Proof of an external world and the effectiveness of Humean Scepticism, it has often been assumed that there is just one kind of it: the one made familiar by the writings of Crispin Wright and Martin Davies. The briefest rehears...

I. In this paper I want to sketch an account of the role of skepticism in Kant's critical philosophy.1 The critical philosophy set forth in the Critique of Pure Reason (henceforth: the Critique) grew from and responds to a complex set of philosophical concerns. Among these two of special importance are concerns to address skepticism and to develop a reformed metaphysics. This much is widely rec...

Our concept of actual causation plays a deep, ever-present role in our experiences. I first argue that traditional philosophical methods for understanding this concept are unlikely to be successful. I contend that we should instead use functional analyses and an understanding of the cognitive bases of causal cognition to gain insight into the concept of actual causation. I additionally provide ...

Most of Hume’s philosophy hinges on the project of founding a new “science of human nature”, mirrored in the successful “experimental method of reasoning” introduced in natural philosophy by Galileo, Newton and their contemporaries. In this essay I make some remarks on this project, with a view to elucidating its nature and exploring its potential fertility in the study of the human mind. I beg...

ions from the overall psychology of a person. Thus, for instance, the notion of a will without an intellect, or of a language module in the absence of belief and desire, is just plain nonsense. Finally, it will not do to speak of the self ’s psychological states and processes themselves—its beliefs, intentions, experiences, and so forth—as being ‘parts,’ much less as being substantial parts, of...

The most distinctive feature of this clearly written and engaging book is that throughout its ten chapters, the author simultaneously develops two independent projects. The first project, as the title suggests, is to introduce the novice to some of the traditional issues in the philosophy of mind. To this end, the book is structured around discussions of dualism, physicalism, the problem of oth...

Bayesianism is the predominant philosophy of science in North-America, the most important school of statistics world-wide, and the general version of the rationalchoice approach in the social sciences. Although often rejected as a theory of actual behavior, it is still the benchmark case of perfect rationality. The paper reviews the development of Bayesianism in philosophy, statistics and decis...

Freedom and moral responsibility have one foot in the practical realm of human affairs and the other in the esoteric realm of fundamental metaphysics—or so we believe. This has been denied, especially in the metaphysics-bashing era occupying the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century, traces of which linger in the present day. But the reasons for this denial seem to us quite implausibl...