---

Wolfgang Spohn is one of the most distinguished analytic philosophers in Germany. His work covers a huge range including epistemology, metaphysics, and philosophy of science. This collection presents 15 of his most important essays on theoretical philosophy.

---

In this collection I present 16 of my, I feel, more substantial papers on theoretical philosophy, 12 as originally published, one co-authored with Ulrike Haas-Spohn (Chapter14), one (Chapter 15) that was a brief conference commentary, but is in fact a suitable appendix to Chapter 14, one as a translation of a German paper (Chapter 12), and one newly written for this volume (Chapter 16), which, however, is only my recent attempt to properly and completely express an argument I had given in two earlier papers. I gratefully acknowledge permission of reprint from the relevant publishers at the beginning of each paper. In disciplinary terms the papers cover epistemology, general philosophy of science, philosophy of language, and philosophy of mind. The section titles Belief, Causation, Laws, Coherence, and Concepts and the paper titles give a more adequate impression of the topics dealt with. The papers are tightly connected. I feel they might be even read as unfolding a program, though this program was never fully clear in my mind and still isn t. In the Introduction I attempt to describe what this program might be, thus drawing a reconstructed red thread, or rather two red threads, through all the papers. This will serve, at the same time, as an overview over the papers collected.

---

Preface Introduction Belief Ch. 1: Ordinal Conditional Functions. A Dynamic Theory of Epistemic States 30 pp. Causation Ch. 2: Direct and Indirect Causes ca. 36 pp. Ch. 3: Bayesian Nets Are All There Is To Causal Dependence 16 pp. Ch. 4: Causation: An Alternative ca. 28 pp. Ch. 5: Causal Laws are Objectifications of Inductive Schemes 30 pp. Laws Ch. 6: Laws, Ceteris Paribus Conditions, and the Dynamics of Belief 22 pp. Ch. 7: Enumerative Induction and Lawlikeness ca. 24 pp. Ch. 8: Chance and Necessity: From Humean Supervenience to Humean Projection ca. 36 pp. Coherence Ch. 9: A Reason for Explanation: Explanations Provide Stable Reasons 32 pp. Ch. 10: Two Coherence Principles 21 pp. Ch. 11: How to Understand the Foundations of Empirical Belief in a Coherentist Way 18 pp. Concepts Ch. 12: A Priori Reasons: Fresh Look at Dispositions ca. 24 pp. Ch. 13: The Character of Color Predicates: A Materialist View 29 pp. Ch. 14: Concepts Are Beliefs About Essences [with Ulrike Haas-Spohn] 30 pp. Ch. 15: The Intentional versus the Propositional Conception of the Objects of Belief ca. 26 pp. Bibliography Index

---