Craig Callender at Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews:
This book’s subtitle is based on a question the physicist Stephen Hawking once asked: “What breathes fire into the equations…?” If understood as asking what makes some propositions laws of nature, Barry Loewer’s book provides an answer: the activity of science. Not God, powers, dispositions, essences, capacities, or primitives. Loewer instead develops a sophisticated “Humean” answer that grounds the origin of nomological modality in scientific practice.
Thirty years ago, Loewer defended a theory of laws of nature inspired by David Lewis (1996). Since then, he has become a champion of all things Humean in the metaphysics of science—from laws to chances to counterfactuals to explanation—and he has helped shape the field as we know it today. Bouncing off Lewis’s rich project, Loewer is, like Lewis, an example of a (these days, rare) systematic philosopher. At the core of his system is, well, the system, the “best system” theory of laws. According to this theory, which traces its origins to J.S. Mill and Frank Ramsey, the laws of nature are the result of the most powerful and compact summary of the fundamental facts of the world. This long-awaited book is a kind of best system manifesto, which motivates and advances the theory based on his three decades of reflection upon it.
more here.
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