ABSTRACT
This question has a presupposition, namely that there are laws of nature. But such a presupposition can be cancelled or suspended or, to use Husserl's apt phrase, ‘bracketed’. Let us set aside this question of reality, to begin, and ask what it means for there to be a law of nature. There are a good half-dozen theories that answer this question today, but, to proceed cautiously, I propose to examine briefly the apparent motives for writing such theories, and two recent examples (Peirce, Davidson) of how philosophers write about laws of nature. Then I shall collect from the literature a number of criteria of adequacy that an account of such laws is meant to satisfy. These criteria point to two major problems to be faced by any account of laws.
