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theses

The essays in this collection begin with an introduction to the problem of the arrow of time, the necessity of the past hypothesis in the standard solution to that puzzle, and an appreciation of the special nature of the low-entropy state posited by the past hypothesis. Chapter 2 includes an explication and brief defense of several philosophical doctrines including an Aristotelian substance view of concrete particulars, logical monism, classical logic as the one true logic, necessitism, and that two-possibility claims afford prima facie epistemic justification. These doctrines build up a prolegomena that plays an essential role in my demolition of various reductive theses in Chapter 3. Chapter 3 knocks down both David Lewis’s Humean supervenience thesis, and Theodore Sider’s new fangled Humeanism. If either of these metaphysical worldviews are correct, the idea that causation is a fundamental relation in the world can never get off the ground. I end chapter 3 with a refutation of two direct arguments for the idea that causation reduces to physical history and natural nomicity. Having concluded that there is no good reason to endorse causal reductionism or a more general reductive thesis that would entail causal reductionism, I articulate and defend a novel account of causal relata and a new realist theory of deterministic causation. Both of these theories constitute the very heart and soul of the account of token physical explanation I defend in Chapter 5. The final substantial chapter features an articulation of the two most complete attempts in quantum cosmology to explain the past hypothesis. I argue that neither explanation succeeds and conclude that given such failures and that there are certain other fine-tuned parameters, and constants, it is likely that there cannot be a scientific explanation of that hypothesis.

ETD_6347

Ph.D.

Includes bibliographical references

by Christopher Gregory Weaver

doi:10.7282/T36D5VVJ

ETD doctoral

The author owns the copyright to this work.