Laws of Nature

Walter Ott is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Virginia. He is the author of Descartes, Malebranche, and the Crisis of Perception (2017), Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy (2009), and Lockes Philosophy of Language (2004). His work has appeared in such journals as Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie and Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. Lydia Patton is an Associate Professor at Virginia Tech. She edited Philosophy, Science, and History: A Guide and Reader (2014), and co-edited, with Benjamin Jantzen and Deborah Mayo, a special issue of Synthese on ontology and methodology. Her work has appeared in Synthese, Studies in History and Philosophy of Science, Kant-Studien, and Historia Mathematica, among others, and in The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century. She is editor-in-chief of HOPOS.

1: Walter Ott and Lydia Patton: Intuitions and Assumptions in the Debate over Laws of Nature
2: Helen Hattab: Early Modern Roots of the Philosophical Concept of a Law of Nature
3: Mary Domski: Laws of Nature and the Divine Order of Things: Descartes and Newton on Truth in Natural Philosophy
4: Walter Ott: Leges sive natura: Bacon, Spinoza, and a Forgotten Concept of Law
5: Stathis Psillos: Laws and Powers in the Frame of Nature
6: Angela Breitenbach: Laws and Ideal Unity
7: John W. Carroll: Becoming Humean
8: Michela Massimi: A Perspectivalist Better Best System Account of Lawhood
9: James Woodward: Laws: An Invariance Based Account
10: Marc Lange: How the Explanations of Natural Laws Make Some Reducible Physical Properties Natural and Explanatorily Powerful
11: Stephen Mumford: Laws and their Exceptions
12: Nancy Cartwright and Pedro Merlussi: Are laws of nature consistent with contingency?