LAUSR

The ongoing debate on the metaphysics of science (hereafter, MS) surely is one of the most exciting things in the philosophy arena these days. There was a funded research project on the MS carried out at the Universities of Bristol, Birmingham, and Nottingham in England (2006–2010), and a 2009 MS conference at the University of Melbourne, Australia. Currently, there is a recently founded society for the MS that emerged in 2015 and hosted its own conferences at Rutgers University (USA, 2015) and the University of Geneva (Switzerland, 2016), with a third conference scheduled for 2017 at Fordham University in New York. Furthermore, publications on the MS have grown exponentially. Ladyman et al.’s (2007) book made an important contribution in favor of a radically naturalistic approach. Articles and books by Esfeld (2007), Maudlin (2007), Ney (2012), and others, have helped refine distinct philosophical positions. Likewise, volumes by Ross et al. (2013), Mumford and Tugby (2013), Morganti (2013), and Gervais (2015), just to mention a few, give us an impression of the collective effort of drawing the frontiers, that is, the aims and scope, of a newly conceived MS discipline. Schrenk’s new book is a significant contribution in this direction. It aims to introduce the reader to key concepts of the MS, such as ‘‘dispositions, counterfactual conditionals, laws of nature, causation, properties, natural kinds, essence and necessity’’ (p. viii). Throughout it deals with an impressive range of arguments, and the author finely makes use of a vast knowledge of the literature, providing an up-todate account of some of the recent trends. Its title announces a titanic task, namely, to deliver both a systematic and historical picture of the MS. In this spirit, Chapter 1 provides a brief history of metaphysics. Chapter 2 introduces the main arguments for the semantics and ontology of dispositions. Chapter 3 examines the main issues