Alex Bird: Dispositional conception & Ceteris Paribus Laws

A live, text-driven seminar on major works in philosophy (mostly analytic). We read the paper together, slowly—stopping to clarify terms, reconstruct arguments, and stress-test claims. You can find the next week's reading here

WARNING

Browse the current and upcoming papers along with past Readings and meetings. Expect highly technical material, dense terminology, and high abstraction. It is full of philosophical jargon and complex technical terms. Your expectation should be to treat it as a graduate seminar in philosophy. We don't assume you have a degree in philosophy, but we do assume philosophical maturity, and/or a crazy level of passion for deductive reasoning. If you are into that sort of thing, be my guest. We will start reviewing of the paper, and start reading from page 8.

DETAILS

Think of properties—mass, charge, fragility—not as inert labels, but as packages of built-in powers. To have charge just is to repel or attract in certain ways. To be fragile just is to shatter when struck. If that’s true, then the laws of nature aren’t mysterious rules glued on top of the universe—they’re simply what follows from the natures of those properties.

So: fix the properties, and the laws come for free. If mass is essentially that which resists acceleration and generates gravitational attraction, then Newton’s laws aren’t contingent “cosmic habits,” they’re locked in by what mass is. That’s why Bird says laws are metaphysically necessary—they hold in all possible worlds where those properties exist.