Properties have an important role in specifying different views on laws of nature: virtually any position on laws will make some reference to properties, and some of the leading views even reduce laws to properties. This chapter will first outline what laws of nature are typically taken to be and then specify their connection to properties in more detail. We then move on to consider three different accounts of properties: natural, essential, and dispositional properties, and we shall see that different (...) conceptions of properties also result in different views of the modal status of laws, such as the question of whether laws are metaphysically necessary or contingent. Finally, there are also important links specifically between properties, natural kinds, and laws of nature that deserve our attention. (shrink)

Anscombe’s 1971 inaugural lecture at Cambridge, entitled ‘Causality and Determination’, has had a lasting influence on a remarkably broad range of philosophers and philosophical debates, touching on fundamental topics in philosophy of science, action theory, the free will debate, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics. Especially where anti-reductionist or pluralist strands of philosophical thought are being seriously considered, one should not be surprised to find references to Anscombe’s lecture. Moreover, there appears to be a growing interest in Anscombe’s comprehensive philosophical (...) outlook, as attested by the recent publication of a weighty collection of essays spanning that outlook in its full breadth in the prestigious Routledge Philosophical Minds series. Against this background it is apt that now, 50 years after the original lecture, a Topical Collection sees the light, circling around the most central themes from Anscombe’s lecture, with a particular emphasis on the question how these hang together, how they form part of the larger philosophical project that Anscombe obviously intended the lecture to highlight. This Introduction motivates the Topical Collection, and introduces the various contributions against that background. (shrink)

In this interview, Ruth Groff discusses how she came to be a realist, her role as a community organizer, her relationship to critical realism, and various issues arising from her published work over the years. Discussion ranges across the nature of positivism and its legacy, the concept of falsehood, realism about causal powers, mind-independent reality, the history of philosophy, and the underlying interest in ideology-critique that runs through her thinking.