Abstract

ExcerptAs Jürgen Habermas has recently pointed out, scientific naturalism represents one of the “two countervailing trends that mark the intellectual tenor of our age,” the other being religious worldviews.1 In a broader intellectual landscape dominated by research programs in neuro- and cognitive science, evolutionary psychology, behavioral genetics and so on, contemporary naturalism symbolizes not only the meta-philosophical framework of these leading intellectual enterprises, but more fundamentally a sort of zeitgeist for our epoch. This is true not only at an epistemological level, characterized today by the efforts of an entire generation of philosophers to “naturalize” knowledge, the mind, consciousness, and…