Dispositional Reality: A Novel Approach to Power Ontology and Metaphysics

Dispositionalism, perhaps the most popular variant of non-Humean metaphysics, submits that dispositions, powers, or capacities, are part of the furniture of the world. In this book I advance an original approach to dispositionalism revolving around the notion of Dispositional Reality; the novelty lies in the fact that the account, unlike most alternatives on the market, does not require the reification of objects, facts, properties, nor their dispositional essences - and is in fact compatible with a far more deflationary approach to dispositions, while still being true to the non-Humean spirit of the proposal. This power metaphysics without powers allows one to dispel several puzzles in recent literature, or recast them under a new light. Albeit with its own peculiarities, this proposal constitutes a variant of explanatory dispositionalism, according to which realism about dispositions ought not to be understood as an ontological inflation, but as an explanatory inversion within thenomic and modal family. Some of these explanations are hereby attempted, and a study of various types of non-causal explanation will be provided.

After receiving his PhD at the Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa with the thesis A World with Powers, Lorenzo Azzano is now a Postdoctoral Researcher at the University of Bergamo, within a project on the metaphysics of properties. His original interests in dispositional properties, the ontology and semantics of modality, and laws of nature, have been recently paired to an interest in developments in meta-ontology and meta-metaphysics (especially on the notions of metaphysical structure, non-causal explanations, and ontological commitment). He has also written and published on mereology, plural logic, and more. His current aim is to deploy and combine a number of these tools to make power metaphysics a clearer and more engaging field of discussion for metaphysicians and philosophers of science of all stripes.