In Religion in the Making, Whitehead sets the stage for an interesting paradox that runs through his whole philosophical work. On the one hand, he defines metaphysics as clearly and succinctly as possible, namely as “the science which seeks to discover the general ideas which are indispensable to the analysis of everything that happens” (RM 84n1). On the other hand, he warns us to mistrust meta...

James Croll (1821–90) occupies a prominent position in the history of physical geology, and his pioneering work on the causes of long-term climate change has been widely discussed. During his life he benefited from the patronage of leading men of science; his participation in scientific debates was widely acknowledged, not least through his election as a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1876. For...

Proponents of the “Belief in Ability Thesis” (BAT) maintain that one deliberates about whether to perform a given action only if one believes that one can perform the action in question. In An Essay on Free Will, Peter van Inwagen endorsed BAT and deployed it in an argument for the incompatibility of deliberation and consistent belief in the nonexistence of free will. Van Inwagen’s argument att...

In a previous publication I showed that counterfactuals grounded in decision making can be given interpretation in terms “imaging” – a process of “mass-shifting” among possible worlds. This paper elaborates on this interpretation and shows the converse: imaging can be given an interpretation in terms of a stochastic decision policy in which agents choose actions with certain probabilities. This...

One type of deflationism about metaphysical modality suggests that it can be analysed strictly in terms of linguistic or conceptual content and that there is nothing particularly metaphysical about modality. Scott Soames is explicitly opposed to this trend. However, a detailed study of Soames’s own account of modality reveals that it has striking similarities with the deflationary account. In t...

Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive our epistemic situation and so not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties distributed over an extension. For example, the property being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is surface. Similar have been ...