Response to Strevens*

Abstract

I am very grateful to the editors of Philosophy and Phenomenological Research for giving me this opportunity to respond to Michael Strevens' review of Making Things Happen (MTH). I believe that many of the positions that Strevens attributes to me and which serve as a basis for his criticisms rest on misinterpretations of MTH. One reason for this is that Strevens reads me with the preoccupations of a metaphysician; another is that he relies heavily, in reporting what he takes to be my views, on restatements of those views within his own terminology and system of concepts rather than on what I actually say. I will cite examples below, but I am also mindful that (for very good reasons) readers of this journal are not going to be interested in a long and tedious list of I-never-saidthat's. For this reason and because I lack the space to respond to everything in Strevens' review, I would encourage readers of this exchange to read MTH and to form their own assessment of its contents.