Metaphysicians, by and large, aim to be scientifically respectable in their theorizing. To what extent do they succeed? That’s an excellent question. But before we can answer it, we need to answer a more basic question: What does it mean to be scientifically respectable in your metaphysical theorizing, anyway?
In this important and original book, Andreas Hüttemann puts forward a novel way of thinking about this second question. He puts forward, in other words, a novel methodology for naturalistic metaphysics. He then uses this methodology to generate a number of substantive metaphysical results regarding laws of nature, causation, and fundamentality. Although both aspects of the book—the methodological commitments and the metaphysical conclusions—are innovative, in what follows I will focus mainly on the former. One of the key claims I will make is that this methodology can be developed and deployed in more ways than one might at first recognize. That...
