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Chance and Temporal Asymmetry
Edited by Alastair Wilson
Excellent line-up of contributors
Brand new work on a hot topic
Includes an introduction which illuminates the connections between the essays, and highlights key themes
Chance and Temporal Asymmetry presents a collection of cutting-edge research papers in the metaphysics of science, tackling the perplexing philosophical problems raised by recent progress in the physics and metaphysics of chance and time. How do the probabilities found in fundamental physics and the probabilities of the special sciences relate to one another? Can a constraint on the initial conditions of the universe underwrite the second law of thermodynamics? How does contemporary quantum theory reframe debates over the nature of chance? What grounds do we have for believing in a fundamental direction to time? And how do all these questions connect up?
The aim of the volume is both to survey and summarize recent debates about chance and temporal asymmetry and to push them forward. Familiar approaches are subjected to searching new critiques, and bold new proposals are made concerning (inter alia) the semantics of chance-attributions, the justification of the Principal Principle connecting chance and degree of belief, and the source of the temporal asymmetry of human experience.
The contributors include world-leading figures in the field, all presenting new work rather than rehashing old ideas, as well as a number of promising junior scholars. A wide-ranging introduction connects the different chapters together, and provides essential background to the debates they take up. Technicality is kept to a minimum and philosophical and conceptual foundations take centre stage.
Chance and Temporal Asymmetry sets the agenda for future work on time and chance, which are central to the emerging sub-field of metaphysics of science. It will be indispensable to graduate students and to specialists in metaphysics and philosophy of science.
Introduction: Chance and Temporal Asymmetry, Alastair Wilson
1. Chance and Context, Toby Handfield & Alastair Wilson
2. Autonomous Chances and the Conflicts Problem, Christopher J. G. Meacham
3. Consistency and Admissibility: Reply to Meacham, Carl Hoefer
4. Proving the Principal Principle, Wolfgang Schwarz
5. A Chancy 'Magic Trick', Alan Hajek
6. From Kolmogorov, to Popper, to Renyi: There?s No Escaping Humphreys? Paradox (When Generalized), Aidan Lyon
7. Is the Past a Matter of Chance?, Antony Eagle
8. The Sharpness of the Distinction Between the Past and the Future, David Z. Albert
9. Experience and the Arrow, L. A. Paul
10. Probability in Physics: Stochastic, Statistical, Quantum, David Wallace
11. Why Physics Can't Explain Everything, Mathias Frisch
12. Statistical-Mechanical Imperialism, Brad Weslake
13. Hume's Dictum and Natural Modality: Counterfactuals, Jessica Wilson
14. Time, Chance, and the Necessity of Everything, Alexander Bird
Alastair Wilson is a Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham and an Adjunct Research Fellow at Monash University. He received his D.Phil from Oxford University in 2011, for a thesis on the metaphysical challenges and opportunities arising from Everettian (many-worlds) quantum mechanics. His current research focuses on modality, chance and fundamentality, and on epistemological and metaphysical questions in cosmology.
David Z. Albert, Columbia University
Alexander Bird, University of Bristol
Antony Eagle, University of Adelaide
Mathias Frisch, University of Maryland
Alan Hájek, Australian National University
Toby Handfield, Monash University
Carl Hoefer, University of Western Ontario
Aidan Lyon, University of Maryland
Christopher J. G. Meacham, University of Massachusetts, Amherst
L. A. Paul, University of North Carolina
Wolfgang Schwarz, Australian National University
David Wallace, University of Oxford
Brad Weslake, University of Rochester
Jessica Wilson, University of Toronto
Alastair Wilson, University of Birmingham
"[T]he volume as a whole serves as a valuable introduction to the ways in which work on chance can and should inform work on temporal asymmetry, and vice-versa...All of these papers are of the highest quality, and all of them take up innovative and interesting philosophical questions. Taken together they amount to a significant advance in our understanding of chance, of temporal asymmetry, and of the connections between the two topics." --Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews Online
"It's a very cohesive volume. Importantly not only do the papers represent high quality research, but most are usually clear and fantastic reads." --Australasian Journal of Philosophy
The Nature of Contingency
Alastair Wilson
One True Cause
Andrew R. Platt
Medical Nihilism
Jacob Stegenga
The Parmenidean Ascent
Michael Della Rocca
Because Without Cause
Marc Lange
Norms and Necessity
Amie L. Thomasson
Linguistic Intuitions
Samuel Schindler, Anna Droż, dż...
Vagueness
Physics Avoidance
Philosophical Letters of David K. Lewis
Helen Beebee and A.R.J. Fisher
Science Wars
Steven L. Goldman
Jeffrey K. McDonough
Absence and Nothing
Stephen Mumford
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