Barry Loewer presents a novel account of the metaphysics of law of
nature, chances, fundamental ontology, and the space-time arena they
occupy. He calls this the Package Deal Account. This aims to answer
Stephen Hawking's question "What is it that breathes fire into the
equations and makes a universe for them to describe?" Loewer's account
stands on the shoulders of David Lewis's Humean Best Systems Account
of laws and chances, but rejects Lewis' Humean ontology of natural
properties, and instead lets the criteria that physicists employ for
evaluating candidate fundamental theories of everything, together with
reality, determine the universe's fundamental ontology. The Package
Deal Account thus advances the project of naturalizing metaphysics.
Loewer discusses the history of the concept of laws of nature, current
philosophical accounts of the metaphysics of laws, and arguments for
and against each of these. He then shows how the Package Deal Account
overcomes objections to each, and how, unlike Lewis's Humean account
and its non-Humean rivals, it is able to accommodate recent
developments in physics, including proposals for theories of quantum
gravity that reject the fundamentality of space-time. Loewer provides
in addition an account of the laws and chances that occur in
non-fundamental special sciences and how they are related to those of
fundamental physics.
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What Breathes Fire into the Equations
Produktdetaljer
ISBN
9780198907718
Publisert
2024
Utgave
1. utgave
Utgiver
Vendor
OUP Oxford
Språk
Product language
Engelsk
Format
Product format
Digital bok
Forfatter