This 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.

[D. H. Mellor] Kant's claim that our knowledge of time is transcendental in his sense, while false of time itself, is true of tenses, i.e. of the locations of events and other temporal entities in McTaggart's A series. This fact can easily, and I think only, be explained by taking time itself to be real but tenseless. /// [J. R. Lucas] Mellor's argument from Kant fails. The difficulties in his first Antinomy are due to topological confusions, not the tensed nature (...) of time. Nor are McTaggart' s difficulties due to the tensed nature of time. The ego-centricity of tensed discourse is an essential feature of communication between selves, each of whom refers himself as 'I', and is required for talking about time as well as experience and agency. Arguments based on the Special Theory are misconceived. Some rest on a confused notion of 'topological simultaneity'. In the General Theory a cosmic time is defined, as also in quantum mechanics, where a natural present is defined by a unique hyperplane of collapse into eigen-ness. (shrink)

Everything we do relies on causation. We eat and drink because this causes us to stay alive. Courts tell us who causes crimes, criminology tell us what causes people to commit them. D.H. Mellor shows us that to understand the world and our lives we must understand causation. _The Facts of Causation_, now available in paperback, is essential reading for students and for anyone interested in reading one of the ground-breaking theories in metaphysics. We cannot understand the world and our (...) place in it without understanding causation. Yet a complete account of the nature and implications of causation does not exist. D.H Mellor's new book is that account. (shrink)

This selection of D. H. Mellor's work demonstrates the wide ranging originality of his work. It gathers together sixteen major papers on related topics. Together they form a complete modern metaphysics. The first five papers 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 physicalist theories of the mind. The next five papers 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 relation 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 decision theory. (shrink)

This is a study of the nature of time. In it, redeploying an argument first presented by McTaggart, the author argues that although time itself is real, tense is not. He accounts for the appearance of the reality of tense - our sense of the passage of time, and the fact that our experience occurs in the present - by showing how time is indispensable as a condition of action. Time itself is further analysed, and Dr Mellor gives answers to (...) most of the metaphysical questions it provokes, concerning the relation of time to space, the dissection of time, and its relation to change and causation. (shrink)

_Probability: A Philosophical Introduction_ introduces and explains the principal concepts and applications of probability. It is intended for philosophers and others who want to understand probability as we all apply it in our working and everyday lives. The book is not a course in mathematical probability, of which it uses only the simplest results, and avoids all needless technicality. The role of probability in modern theories of knowledge, inference, induction, causation, laws of nature, action and decision-making makes an understanding of (...) it especially important to philosophers and students of philosophy, to whom this book will be invaluable both as a textbook and a work of reference. In this book D. H. Mellor discusses the three basic kinds of probability – physical, epistemic, and subjective – and introduces and assesses the main theories and interpretations of them. The topics and concepts covered include: * chance * frequency * possibility * propensity * credence * confirmation * Bayesianism. _Probability: A Philosophical Introduction_ is essential reading for all philosophy students and others who encounter or need to apply ideas of probability. (shrink)

D. H. Mellor; VI*—Conscious Belief, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 78, Issue 1, 1 June 1978, Pages 87–102, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian.

This book deals not so much with statistical methods as with the central concept of chance, or statistical probability, which statistical theories apply to nature.

Scholarly interest in epiteichismos has, for various reasons, been centred almost exclusively upon the Athenian occupation of Pylos and the Spartan occupation of Decelea. In occupying Pylos the Athenians were adopting epiteichismos for the first time, as were the Spartans in occupying Decelea. Both enterprises were on a considerable scale and deeply influenced the course of the Peloponnesian war, though neither so decisively as had initially seemed likely. Another source of interest in them is their link with the perennial problem (...) of speeches in Thucydides. The Thucydidean versions of speeches delivered shortly before the outbreak of the Archidamian war include references to the possibility that epiteichismos might be attempted by both sides , although in fact Athens did not do so until 425, and then partly by accident, and Sparta not until much later. These puzzling references have been thought by some scholars to be anachronistic, while others have disputed this inference, maintaining that even before the war military leaders had in mind the possibility of epiteichismos. A similar if less vexed problem arises from the fact that the occupation of Decelea, vigorously recommended by Alcibiades in the Thucydidean version of his speech at Sparta at the end of 415 and apparently accepted with enthusiasm , was not implemented until the spring of 413. (shrink)

The article is derived from the accompanying radio portrait. It was published in 1995 in Philosophy 70, 243-262, and is reproduced here by permission of the Editor. Page numbers after quotations from Ramsey refer to F. P. Ramsey: Philosophical Papers, edited by D. H. Mellor, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

In this celebrated sentence Thucydides gives his opinion more specifically than anywhere in the narrative of Books 6 and 7 on the reasons for the failure of the Sicilian expedition. Unfortunately, however, he expresses his views with some lack of clarity, and this has led to disagreement among modern scholars who have sought to determine precisely what he means. It is also unfortunate that he does not state the evidence upon which he bases his conclusion that the expedition failed because (...) of struggles for political leadership at Athens. The main purpose of this paper is to consider the meaning and implications of this sentence, which can, I believe, be clarified by reference to other passages in which Thucydides uses when debating the causes of past actions. A closely allied problem, that of the relationship between this sentence and the narrative of Books 6 and 7, will also be discussed. A. W. Gomme has maintained that this relationship throws some light upon the date of composition of Books 6 and 7. There is no doubt whatever that the sentence was written at or after the end of the Peloponnesian war , and if there are differences of outlook, even inconsistencies, between it and the narrative which show that Thucydides cannot have written, or at any rate conceived, both at the same time, he almost certainly wrote the narrative before the end of the war.2 In my opinion there is inconsistency on one point only, but here the inconsistency is sufficiently marked to suggest not only that Books 6 and 7 were written considerably earlier than 2. 65. 11, but that they were written within the next few years after the conclusion of the Sicilian campaign. (shrink)

The narrative of Thucydides on the period from the Peace of Nicias to the Athenian expedition to Sicily has been less intensively studied than any other part of the History. It is true that the Melian Dialogue, which contrasts so sharply with the rest of the fifth book, has accumulated a large bibliography. The problems arising from the campaign culminating in the battle of Mantinea have also received a considerable amount of attention. On the other hand, the accounts of negotiations (...) and intrigues, mostly in the Peloponnese, which occupy much of the fifth book, have tended to be ignored, being thought to be obscure, confusing, and tedious. Scholars interested in the history of the period have experienced difficulty in tracing a coherent pattern in its catalogue of diplomatic manœuvres and in establishing the motives which prompted them. Scholars interested in the historical technique of Thucydides have been disappointed, even repelled, because his facility for mastering his material seems to have to a large extent deserted him. (shrink)

​Vielleicht nie zuvor war Toleranz so wichtig wie in der heutigen Welt, in der Menschen verschiedenster Kulturregionen und Religionsgemeinschaften zusammenkommen. Der Toleranzbegriff wird nach wie vor fast ausschließlich aus der Perspektive der europäisch-westlichen Traditionen dargestellt. Mit dem vorliegenden Band wird zum ersten Mal versucht, umfassend in die Weltgeschichte der Toleranz einzuführen. Über 30 Autoren aus verschiedenen Fachgebieten und Nationen haben ihre Forschungen zu Methoden und Themen der Toleranzfrage zusammengetragen. So ist sowohl ein einführendes und weitere Forschungen anregendes Kompendium als auch (...) ein Lehrbuch für Studierende der Sozial- und Kulturwissenschaften, der Philosophie, Theologie, Rechts- sowie Religionswissenschaft entstanden. (shrink)

We propose a class of new gauge field models in 2n dimensions, with n not less than4. These systems are unrelated to Yang-Mills, in the sense that their gauge-field Higgs descendants in lower dimensions do not include the Yang-Mills dynamics.

The interpretations of measurements in Bohm's and Everett's quantum theories are compared. Since both theories are based on the assumption of a universally valid Schrödinger equation, they face the common problem of how to explain that arrow of time, which in conventional quantum theory is represented by the collapse of the wave function. Its solution requires, in a statistical sense, a very improbable initial condition for thetotal wave function of the universe. The historical importance of Bohm's quantum theory is pointed (...) out. (shrink)