2026.02.9 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Barry Loewer, Laws of Nature and Chances: What Breathes Fire into the Equations, Oxford University Press, 2024, 160 pp., $60.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198907695.
Reviewed by Craig Callender, University of California San Diego
This book’s subtitle is based on a question the physicist Stephen Hawking once asked: “What breathes fire into the equations…?” If understood as asking what makes some propositions laws of nature, Barry Loewer’s book provides an answer: the activity of science. Not God, powers, dispositions, essences, capacities, or primitives. Loewer instead develops a sophisticated “Humean” answer that grounds the origin of nomological modality in scientific practice.
Thirty years ago, Loewer defended a theory of laws of nature inspired by David Lewis (1996). Since then, he has become a champion of all things Humean in the metaphysics of science—from laws to chances to counterfactuals to explanation—and he has helped shape the field as we know it today. Bouncing off Lewis’s rich project, Loewer is, like…
