ABSTRACT
Forced into a subtle but significant rethink, the connection between properties and powers seemed a crucial issue. Sydney Shoemaker argued that properties were clusters of conditional causal powers: conditional in the sense that they could do things when suitably partnered with other powers. A certain shape, plus hardness, gives a knife the power to cut, for instance. Shoemaker was claiming that properties were constituted by causal powers. One of the great attractions of the ontology of powers is the work that they can do. Mind, properties and substances have thus far been discussed in terms of powers. The world will be full of causal activity in any case, just because it is a powerful world. Even some of those who have accepted a dispositional ontology have been somewhat prone to thinking of the world in passivist ways. The willing, the exercise of the power and resistance to it are all to be found in the same proprioceptive experience.
