In order to refute the widely held belief that the game known as ‘Newcomb's paradox’ is physically nonsensical and impossible to imagine (e.g. because it involves backward causation), I tell a story in which the game is realized in a classical, deterministic universe in a physically plausible way. The predictor is a collection of beings which are by many orders of magnitude smaller than the player and which can, with their exquisite measurement techniques, observe the particles in the player's body (...) so accurately that they can predict his choice (in much the same way as we can predict the motion of celestial bodies). I argue that the player, by choosing whether to take only one box or both boxes, influences whether or not, in the past, the predictor put a million pounds into the second box. Yet, I establish that no causal paradox can arise in this set-up. (shrink)

I discuss candidates for definitions of determinism in the context of general relativistic spacetimes, and argue that a definition which does not make recourse to any particular region of spacetime should be preferred over alternatives; one such notion is discussed in detail in the light of various physical examples. The emerging picture of determinism is a pluralist one: sometimes there is no unique way of making our intuitive concept of determinism precise. Instead, what is crucial for assessment of determinism of (...) the theory are auxiliary conditions under which it counts as deterministic or indeterministic, and justification for using them in a given situation. (shrink)

This paper forms part of a wider campaign: to deny pointillisme. That is the doctrine that a physical theory's fundamental quantities are defined at points of space or of spacetime, and represent intrinsic properties of such points or point-sized objects located there; so that properties of spatial or spatiotemporal regions and their material contents are determined by the point-by-point facts. Elsewhere, I argued against pointillisme about chrono-geometry, and about velocity in classical mechanics. In both cases, attention focussed on temporal extrinsicality: (...) i.e. on what an ascription of a property implies about other times. Therefore, I also discussed the metaphysical debate whether persistence should be understood as endurance or perdurance. In this paper, I focus instead on spatial extrinsicality: i.e. on what an ascription of a property implies about other places. The main idea will be that the classical mechanics of continuous media involves a good deal of spatial extrinsicality---which seems not to have been noticed by philosophers, even those who have no inclination to pointillisme. I begin by describing my wider campaign. Then I present some elementary aspects of stress, strain and elasticity---emphasising the kinds of spatial extrinsicality they each involve. I conduct the discussion entirely in the context of `Newtonian' ideas about space and time. But my arguments carry over to relativistic physics. (shrink)

I extract some philosophical morals from some aspects of Lagrangian mechanics. One main moral concerns methodology: Lagrangian mechanics provides a level of description of phenomena which has been largely ignored by philosophers, since it falls between their accustomed levels---``laws of nature'' and ``models''. Another main moral concerns ontology: the ontology of Lagrangian mechanics is both more subtle and more problematic than philosophers often realize. The treatment of Lagrangian mechanics provides an introduction to the subject for philosophers, and is technically elementary. (...) In particular, it is confined to systems with a finite number of degrees of freedom, and for the most part eschews modern geometry. (shrink)