D. H. Mellor
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Item Open Access Words(BBC, 1978) Mellor, David HughThis is a series of six five-minute radio talks on the use of words in philosophy broadcast on BBC Radio 3 between 5 February and 16 March 1978.Item Open Access Matters of Metaphysics(Cambridge University Press, 1991) Mellor, David Hugh; Crane, TimThis volume contains sixteen papers published between 1974 and 1991. The first five are on aspects of the mind: on our 'selves', their supposed subjectivity and how we refer to them, on the nature of conscious belief and on computational and physical theories of the mind. The next five deal with dispositions, natural kinds, laws of nature and how they involve natural necessity, universals and objective chances, and the relation between properties and predicates. Then follow three papers about the relations between time, change and causation, the nature of individual causes and effects and of the causal relations between them, and how causation depends on chance. The last three papers discuss the relation between chance and degrees of belief, give a solution to the problem of induction and argue for an objective interpretation of normative decision theory.Item Open Access The Matter of Chance(Cambridge University Press, 1971) Mellor, David HughThe book develops an account of objective chances as properties of events (e.g. of coin tosses) defined by the degrees of belief (e.g. that the coin will land heads) which embody knowledge of those chances. The chances manifest propensities: dispositional properties of objects (e.g. a coin's bias). The account is applied to theories of radioactive decay and of how human death risk increases with age, and is used to show how knowledge of propensities underlies apparently a priori derivations of classical chance distributions. Finally it shows how propensities entail indeterminism and are consistent with a Humean view of laws of nature.Item Open Access Wholes and Parts: The Limits of Composition(South African Journal of Philosophy, 2006-06) Mellor, David HughThe paper argues that very different part-whole relations hold between different kinds of entities. While these relations share most of their formal properties, they need not share all of them. Nor need other mereological principles be true of all kinds of part–whole pairs. In particular, it is argued that the principle of unrestricted composition, that any two or more entities have a mereological sum, while true of sets and propositions, is false of things and events.Item Open Access Interview with D. H. Mellor (1993)(Cogito, 1993) Mellor, David HughThis article is the text of an interview with D. H. Mellor conducted by Andrew Pyle and first published in the Spring 1993 issue of the philosophical journal Cogito.Item Open Access Interview with D. H. Mellor (2001)(Theoria, 2001) Mellor, David Hugh; Maurin, Anna-Sofia; Persson, JohannesThis article is the text of an interview with D. H. Mellor conducted in Cambridge on 30 May 2001 by Anna-Sofia Maurin and Johannes Persson for the philosophical journal Theoria.Item Open Access Inaugural Lecture: The Warrant of Induction(Cambridge University Press, 1988-01-21) Mellor, David HughThis lecture develops and defends an inductive solution to Hume's problem of inductionItem Open Access The Time of Our Lives(Cambridge University Press, 2001) Mellor, David HughThe article shows how McTaggart’s distinction between A- and B-series ways of locating events in time prompted and enabled the twentieth century’s most important advances in the philosophy of time. It argues that, even if the B-series represents time as it really is, because having A-series beliefs when they are true is indispensable to the causation of timely action, the A-series represents ‘the time of our lives’.