Matters of Metaphysics

This selection of D. H. Mellor’s work demonstrates the wide ranging originality of his work. It gathers together sixteen major papers on related topics written over the last seventeen years. Together they form a complete modern metaphysics. The first five papers are on aspects of the mind: on our ‘selves’, their supposed subjectivity and how we refer to them, on the nature of conscious belief and on computational and physicalist theories of the mind. The next five papers deal with dispositions, natural kinds, laws of nature and how they involve natural necessity, universals and objective chances, and the relation between properties and predicates. Then follow three papers about the relations between time, change and causation, the nature of individual causes and effects and of the causal relation between them, and how causation depends on chance. The last three papers discuss the relation between chance and degrees of belief, give a solution to the problem of induction, and argue for an objective interpretation of decision theory. Two of the papers included here have been especially written for this volume, another has been revised for it, and many have hitherto been relatively inaccessible. A substantial introduction summarises the papers and indicates the connections between them.