The different sciences furnish us with a wide variety of explanations: some work at macroscopic scales, some at microscopic scales, and some operate across different levels. How do these different explanations fit together? This book looks at levels of explanations across different sciences, as well as at levels of explanation in philosophy itself.

Katie Robertson and Alastair Wilson: Introduction: Levels of Explanation Part I: Foundations of Explanatory Levels 1: Christian List: Levels of Description and Levels of Reality: A General Framework 2: Angela Potochnik: Antireductionism Has Outgrown Levels 3: Alexander Franklin: How the Reductionist Should Respond to the Multiscale Argument, and What This Tells Us About Levels Part II: Levels of Explanation in Causal Modelling 4: Brad Weslake: Exclusion Excluded 5: Vera Hoffmann-Kolss: Interventionist Causal Exclusion and the Challenge of Mixed Models 6: David Yates: From Multilevel Explanation to Downward Causation Part III: Levels of Explanation in Higher-Level Sciences 7: William Bechtel: Explanatory Levels in Living Organisms 8: Mazviita Chirimuuta: From Analogies to Levels of Abstraction in Cognitive Neuroscience 9: Harold Kincaid: Messy but Real Levels in the Social Sciences Part IV: Levels of Explanation in Physics 10: Eleanor Knox: Levels Worth Having: A View from Physics 11: Karen Crowther: Levels of Fundamentality in the Metaphysics of Physics 12: Kerry McKenzie: No Grounds for Effective Theories Part V: Levels of Explanation in Mathematics and Metaphysics 13: Carolin Antos and Mark Colyvan: Explanation in Descriptive Set Theory 14: Elanor Taylor: A Dormitive Virtue Puzzle 15: Nina Emery: The Explanatory Role Argument and the Metaphysics of Deterministic Chance Part VI: How are Explanatory Levels Possible? 16: Harjit Bhogal: Why Are There High-Level Regularities? 17: Michael Strevens: Why High-Level Explanations Exist 18: Michael Townsen Hicks: A Democracy of Laws

Katie Robertson is Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Stirling. After completing the BPhil in Philosophy in Oxford, she did her PhD in Cambridge on the philosophy of thermal physics. She was then a postdoc with the FraMEPhys project at the University of Birmingham, before being awarded a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship exploring the relationship between thermodynamics and black holes. Her research has focused on questions about how different sciences, or levels, fit together. She has also worked on how non-fundamental theories such as thermodynamics and their quantities like entropy are related to more fundamental quantities in quantum mechanics. Alastair Wilson is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds, specializing in metaphysics, philosophy of science (especially physics), and epistemology. Before joining Leeds, he spent 11 years at the University of Birmingham and 18 months as a postdoc at Monash University. His doctoral thesis was on the metaphysics of Everettian (many-worlds) quantum mechanics; this line of thought culminated in his book The Nature of Contingency: Quantum Physics as Modal Realism (OUP, 2020). More recently he has focused on explanation and dependence in physics; he has also worked on grounding, laws of nature, chance, and the epistemology of self-locating belief.

This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. Includes 18 new articles from world-leading experts, providing new insights into the topic of levels of explanation. Brings metaphysicians and philosophers of science into dialogue, giving a wide range of perspectives that might not be encountered next to each other elsewhere. Explores levels of explanation as they apply across a range of different sciences, in mathematics, and in philosophy, avoiding simplifications arising from considering only a limited range of archetypal examples.