Frontmatter -- Table of Contents -- I. The Discovery of Dispositions: Ancient Foundations -- Knowledge and Virtue as Dispositions in Plato's Theaetetus -- Aristotle's Theory of Dispositions From the Principle of Movement to the Unmoved Mover -- Dispositions in Greek Historiography -- II. The Debate about Dispositions from the Beginning of Modern Sciences to the 20th century -- The Dispositions of Descartesc -- Explicable Explainers: the Problem of Mental Dispositions in Spinoza's Ethics -- Harmonizing Modern Physics with Aristotelian Metaphysics. Leibniz's Theory of Force -- From Ordinary Language to the Metaphysics of Dispositions - Gilbert Ryle on Disposition Talk and Dispositions -- III. Contemporary Philosophical Analyses of Dispositions -- Hic Rhodos, Hic Salta: From Reductionist Semantics to a Realist Ontology of Forceful Dispositions -- Ascribing Dispositions -- Dispositional Pluralism -- Dispositions and Their Intentions -- IV. The Role of Dispositions in Scientific and Philosophical Contexts -- Dispositions in Physics -- The Role of Dispositions in Historical Explanations -- Empathy, Mental Dispositions, and the Physicalist Challenge -- Dispositional Knowledge-How versus Propositional Knowledge-That -- Epistemic Virtues and Cognitive Dispositions -- The Epistemic Function of Virtuous Dispositions -- Backmatter.