Lawlessness

Yemima Ben-Menahem

doi:10.1007/978-3-030-96775-8_12

Lawlessness

Yemima Ben-Menahem^*

^*Corresponding author for this work

Department of Philosophy

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceeding › Chapter › peer-review

Abstract

One route through which the possibility of lawlessness has entered scientific and philosophical discourse about laws of nature is Wheeler’s celebrated vision of “law without law.” I leave Wheeler’s question about the origin of laws in general unanswered, but examine three more limited kinds of lawlessness. The first is Feynman’s derivation of the principle of least action from an underlying quantum level which, on his account, is (nearly) lawless. The second stems from Davidson’s anomalous monism—the thesis that the mental is lawless and irreducible to fundamental physics—and pursues applications of this thesis both within and outside of physics. The third kind of lawlessness derives from the algorithmic notion of randomness and its compatibility with determinism.

Original language	English
Title of host publication	Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
Publisher	Springer International Publishing
Pages	323-345
Number of pages	23
DOIs	https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-96775-8_12
State	Published - 2022

Publication series

Name	Jerusalem Studies in Philosophy and History of Science
Volume	Part F11854
ISSN (Print)	2524-4248
ISSN (Electronic)	2524-4256

Bibliographical note

Publisher Copyright:
© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2022.

Keywords

Andrey N. Kolmogorov
Complexity theory
Determinism
Gregory J. Chaitin
John Archibald Wheeler
Non-reductive physicalism
Origin of laws
Randomness
Reduction
Richard Feynman

Access to Document

10.1007/978-3-030-96775-8_12

Cite this

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Lawlessness

Abstract

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Keywords

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