Sankey H. (ed.) Causation and Laws of Nature

Springer, 1999. — 358 p.Causation and Laws of Nature is a collection of articles which represents current research on the metaphysics of causation and laws of nature, mostly by authors working in or active in the Australasian region. The book provides an overview of current work on the theory of causation, including counterfactual, singularist, nomological and causal process approaches. It also covers work on the nature of laws of nature, with special emphasis on the scientific essentialist theory that laws of nature are, at base, the fundamental dispositions or capacities of natural kinds of things. Because the book represents a good cross-section of authors currently working on these themes in the Australasian region, it conveys something of the interest and excitement of an active philosophical debate between advocates of several different research programmes in the area.Introduction (by Howard Sankey).
Making Sense of Laws of Physics (by Alan Chalmers).
Causal Powers and Laws of Nature (by Brian Ellis).
Comment on Ellis (by D.M. Armstrong).
Response to David Armstrong (by Brian Ellis).
Scientific Ellisianism (by John Bigelow).
Bigelow's Worries About Scientific Essentialism (by Brian Ellis).
The Naturalness Theory of Laws (by Martin Leckey).
Nomic Necessity and Natural States: Comment on the Leckey-Bigelow Theory of Laws (by Caroline Lierse).
Are the Laws of Nature Deductively Closed? (by Alan Baker).
Laws of Nature as Relations Between Quantities? (by John Forge).
Real Law in Peirce's "Pragmaticism" (Or: How Scholastic Realism Met the Scientific Method) (by Cathy Legg).
Finkish Dispositions (by David Lewis).
Comments on David Lewis: 'Finkish Dispositions' (by Barry Taylor).
Laws and Cosmology (by J.J.C. Smart).
Comment on Smart (by D.M. Armstrong).
The Open Door: Counterfactual versus Singularist Theories of Causation (by D.M. Armstrong).
Causal Dependence and Laws (by F. John Clendinnen).
Causation is the Transfer of Information (by John D. Collier).
Good Connections: Causation and Causal Processes (by Phil Dowe).
Probabilistic Causal Structure (by Kevin B. Korb).
Intrinsic versus Extrinsic Conceptions of Causation (by Peter Menzies).
The Role of History in Microphysics (by Huw Price).
No Interaction Without Prior Correlation: Comment on Huw Price (by Keith Hutchison).