Chance and Temporal Asymmetry
ISBN: 9780191782534
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Oxford University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Metaphysics Philosophy of Science;

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.


Alastair Wilson, University of Birmingham

Alastair Wilson is a Birmingham Fellow at the University of Birmingham, specializing in research in metaphysics and the philosophy of science. He took the BA in Physics and Philosophy and the BPhil and DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford, where he was awarded the John Locke Prize in Mental Philosophy. He wrote his doctoral thesis under John Hawthorne and Simon Saunders on the metaphysical challenges and opportunities arising from Everettian (many-worlds) quantum mechanics. After eighteen months as a post-doctoral research fellow at Monash University, he took up a permanent research-oriented position in Birmingham in January 2012. His current research focuses on the nature of possibility and of fundamentality, and on epistemological and metaphysical questions in cosmology.

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