Abstract

Philosophical naturalism in the spirit of Wilfred Sellars has historically sought to present a unified picture of the world, in which values, meanings, and minds find a place in the natural universe. But a number of recent thinkers have questioned the very idea of “the world” as a unified whole, arguing instead for disunity in the various discourses human beings use to talk about things. In this article I consider three such pluralist views. First, I take up the work of Huw Price, who combines pluralism and naturalism; then, I look at Markus Gabriel and Raymond Geuss, whose rejection of the ideas of “world” and “worldview” is not tied to naturalist presuppositions. In response to these views, I defend weaker conceptions of “the world” and “worldview,” utilizing Hans-Georg Gadamer's idea of the “medium of language” and making the case for the unifying effects of language across the plurality of discourses.