Comments on Woodward, Making Things Happen

I welcome the chance to revisit my review of Making Things Happen and the book itself (Woodward 2003; Strevens 2007) in the light of Woodward’s response to the review (henceforth “Woodward’s reply”). In what follows I hope to provide a surer footing for some of the claims made in the original review, to address the new definition of unrelativized causation proposed in Woodward’s reply, and to expand my own appreciation of the manifold aims of the book, while expressing some doubt as to whether they can be realized by a single system of definitions. I have more to say than I can reasonably fit into this piece; I hope that my silence on some matters will not be interpreted as a concession. (In particular, I am fairly sure that what Woodward has to say about explanation implicitly commits him to what he calls “potentialism”.)