Book Reviews William A. Bauer. Causal Powers and the Intentionality Continuum. New York: Cam- bridge University Press, 2023. 232 pp. Causal Powers and the Intentionality Continuum reads like a book-length response to the challenge laid down by Stephen Barker in his excoriating criticism of powers ontologies 1 . Barker argues that the leading attempts to locate physical modality within dispositional properties inevitably collapse into a Neo-Humean metaphysic, whereby physical modality (necessity, pos- sibility) derives strictly from first-order facts about actual or possible worlds. At one point in his polemic, Barker dismisses as “deeply obscure” (649) George Molnar’s thesis of physical intentionality 2 , which Barker alludes might otherwise explain how a disposition’s stimulus brings about its mani- festation without covert appeal to nomic necessitation or other lawlike relations that powers theorists reject. Although I lack the space to compare Bauer’s and Molnar’s accounts of physical intentionality in this review, I can at least report that Bauer presents the notion in an accessible way, such that accusations of obscurity against it would fall flat (but see my later remarks). To be fair, Bauer introduces his book more generally than I. He explains that the book’s two parts answer his two guiding questions: “Why powers?” and “What are powers like?” (2). He promises a “3d account of powers” whereby “dispositions” exhibit “directedness (i. e., intentionality)” by means of “data (i. e., information)” (16) about how to manifest among other proxi- mate powers. In Chapter 1, he explicitly professes to “reverse” Barker’s “strategy” (22), arguing that both the “Neo-Humean Model” (which grounds modality in categorical properties) and the “Universals Model” (that grounds modality in a “lawful connection” between categorical universals) require a powers ontology (24, Figure 1.1; 33, Figure 1.3). In Chapter 2, Bauer explains his preference for a “Pure Powers Model” over a “Powerful Qualities Model” (38), the former of which denies of dispositions a qualitative nature or sub- venient categorical base, and the latter of which admits (and usually requires) 1 Barker, Stephen. 2013. “The Emperor’s New Metaphysics of Powers.” Mind 122:605–53. 2 Molnar, George. 2003. Powers. Oxford: Oxford University Press. PTSc 11 (2024), 299–302 DOI 10.1628/ptsc-2024-0020 ISSN 2195-9773 © 2024 Nicholas M. Danne