In recent years a resurgence of interest in the laws of nature has led to a number of new books on the topic, articulating a variety of perspectives from neo-empiricism to neo-Aristotelianism, and from primitivism to eliminativism. Of these new works, in my view, the most original and intriguing is Marc Lange's Laws and Lawmakers. It has long been noted that laws support counterfactual and subjunctive conditionals. Generally those who have thought this an important relationship have held, as would seem natural, that laws are prior to the conditionals. Nonetheless, Nelson Goodman pointed out the difficulty of straightforwardly deriving the conditionals from laws plus categorical facts. David Lewis's metaphysics has the conditionals fixed by the proximity structure of possible worlds, which is itself in turn fixed in part by the laws—similarity of laws trumps similarity of nonnomic facts in making worlds close. But it is not clear what metaphysical...
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