Baylor’s Alexander Pruss offers this nifty Aristotelian critique of Humean natural law: “The most basic dichotomy between views of laws of nature is that between Humean views on which the laws of nature are merely descriptions of the actual states of affairs that obtain, and anti-Humean views according to which the laws of nature have modal import and describe something over and beyond correlations between actual states of affairs. The best argument against the Humean approach may well be the very one that Aristotle levies against Platonic Forms: Humean laws of nature do not have any causal power and fail to explain anything. That all ravens are black is only explanatorily relevant to the claim that Smitty my raven is black if its force goes beyond the mere description of the color of the ravens in existence. If it is a mere coincidence that all ravens are black, then this accidental generalization fails to explain Smitty’s blackness. Indeed, explaining the blackness of Smitty by the blackness of all ravens when the latter is a mere coincidence is explaining the obscure by the more obscure—the coincidence of all ravens being black is more surprising and calls out for explanation more than Smitty’s happening to be black.”
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