Potentiality and Virtuality

EXCERPT

‘Hume’s problem’, that is to say, the problem of the grounding of causal connection, has known the fate of most ontological problems: a progressive abandonment, legitimated by the persistent failure that various attempts at resolving it have met with. Thus Nelson Goodman, in a famous article, can affirm without hesitation the ‘dissolution of the old problem of induction’. This dissolution, as laid out by Goodman, concerns the ontological character of Hume’s problem, which obliges whoever accepts its terms to accept the necessity of a principle of the uniformity of nature, a principle the proof of whose existence will then be attempted…