The "laws of nature" are the general ways of working of the physical and mental world. Many natural scientists have as one of their great aims the uncovering of these laws. The topic of laws of nature has been the subject of vigorous discussion in contemporary philosophy. Three broad tendencies have emerged, with a number of important variations within these tendencies.

The Regularity or Humean View

Since the work of David Hume, at least, there have been many philosophers, particularly those in the empiricist tradition, who have tried to analyze both causes and laws (which they tend not to distinguish very clearly) in terms of mere regular successions or other regularities in the behavior of things. Laws tell us that, given a phenomenon of a certain sort, then a further phenomenon of a certain sort must occur in a certain relation to the first...