Naturalism is the label for the thesis that the tools we should use in answering philosophical problems are the methods and findings of the mature sciences—from physics across to biology and increasingly neuroscience. It enables us to rule out answers to philosophical questions that are incompatible with scientific findings. It enables us to rule out epistemological pluralism—that the house of knowledge has many mansions, as well as skepticism about the reach of science. It bids us doubt that there (...) are facts about reality that science cannot grasp. It gives us confidence to assert that by now in the development of science, absence of evidence is prima facie good grounds for evidence of absence: this goes for God, and a great deal else. (shrink)

An increasingly common form of naturalism associated with the study of morality is what might be called “scientific naturalism,” which takes as its subject matter various empirical phenomena associated with talk of “morality” and aims to subject them to scientific inquiry, just like any other empirical phenomena. This is unproblematic when it comes to scientific investigations into the origins of the human capacity for normative guidance or moral emotions, or the neurophysiology associated with moral feeling (...) and behavior, but things get much more complicated when it comes to the project of explaining our moral beliefs. It is, of course, an empirical phenomenon that we hold the moral beliefs we do, so it may seem obvious that this too can be causally explained using scientific tools. But, while there is room for scientific inquiry into causal factors, such as evolutionary influences, that have plausibly helped to shape many moral beliefs to some degree, it is a mistake to assume that our moral beliefs across the board can best be explained through appeal exclusively to scientifically accessible causes. This scientific naturalist exclusivity assumption is in fact deeply problematic, overlooking (or prematurely dismissing) the possibility that at least many of our moral beliefs are best explained through our grasping of good reasons for them – considerations we correctly understand as justifying them, though this is not something that shows up in scientific causal explanations. It is easy to miss this point about the potential role of the appreciation of justification by the believing mind when considering moral judgments simply from the external perspective of an amoral anthropologist, but it becomes clear when taking up the internal perspective of the committed moral agent, as when thinking about why we ourselves believe that human trafficking is wrong. This matters because, while science is invoked by those who purport to provide “debunking explanations” of our moral beliefs across the board (showing them to result simply from causal factors insensitive to any objective moral facts), they are actually relying on the scientific naturalist exclusivity assumption, thus begging the question against their opponents, who hold that we have knowledge of objective morality as a result of grasping good reasons for it. I explore these complexities surrounding the explanation of our moral beliefs and argue that while the picture advocated by debunkers remains a possibility, it is certainly not established by science, and recent arguments purporting to debunk the idea of knowable, objective morality fail. (shrink)

In this article, I investigate the possibility of reconciling a radically disenchanted scientific naturalism in ontology with the unconditional and non-instrumental character of the moral point of view. My point of departure will be Sellars’s philosophy, which attempts to satisfy both those, seemingly unreconcilable, demands at once. I shall argue that there is a tension between those two demands that finds expression both at the theoretical and practical level, and which is not adequately resolved from a strictly Sellarsian (...) perspective. I will then develop a neo-Sellarsian framework, close to the spirit—if not the letter—of Sellars’s philosophy, which, as I will suggest, can live up to this task. This solution depends (1) on insisting on both the semantic irreducibility and explanatory reducibility of moral normativity to non-normative facts, while simultaneously acknowledging that those two dimensions mutually presuppose and support on another, and (2) on recognizing that the instrumental facets of theoretical-scientific rationality need not imply a coercive attitude toward nature, ourselves, and others. (shrink)

Although attempts to explain religious experience in terms of brain processes usually presuppose the identification of scientific naturalism with the sensationist, atheistic, materialist version of naturalism (naturalismsam), this version is inadequate for science, and human experience more generally, for numerous reasons. An alternative version, based on panexperientialism, panentheism, and a prehensive doctrine of perception (naturalismppp), not only avoids those problems but also allows for religious experience understood as the soul's direct experience of a Holy Reality.

Although attempts to explain religious experience in terms of brain processes usually presuppose the identification of scientific naturalism with the sensationist, atheistic, materialist version of naturalism (naturalismsam), this version is inadequate for science, and human experience more generally, for numerous reasons. An alternative version, based on panexperientialism, panentheism, and a prehensive doctrine of perception (naturalismppp), not only avoids those problems but also allows for religious experience understood as the soul's direct experience of a Holy Reality.

The paper reconsiders social scientific naturalism, the view that despite obvious differences in their subject matter, the social sciences belong to the same species of cognitive inquiry as the natural sciences. Among other limits, the paper explores social scientific naturalism only with respect to economics. The social sciences are not homogeneous, and although many of the things I shall say apply to psychology, political science, sociology, and anthropology as well as to economics, I do not have (...) the space to consider the many varieties of social inquiries. After a historical introduction in Section 5.1, Sections 5.2 and 5.3 clarify what is being asked when one raises the question of whether economics is relevantly similar to the natural sciences and why the question is worth asking. Section 5.4 then considers arguments to the effect that the subject matter of economics – namely human beings and their behavior – cannot be the subject of scientific inquiry. Sections 5.5 and 5.6 focus on an important peculiarity of economics and the other social sciences, namely, that it employs concepts that are continuous with those of daily life. This fact turns out to have considerable ramifications. Section 5.7 concludes. (shrink)

By dialectical fundamentalism I mean the view that maintains the inerrancy of the orthodox classical scriptures of dialectical materialism; by flexible scientific naturalism I mean the view recognizing the past heuristic value of dialectical materialism, but also the realization for the need to develop and change it along lines suggested by complementary philosophies relevant to the scientific outlook.

For nineteenth century British scientific naturalists like Charles Darwin, Thomas Henry Huxley, and John Tyndall, translation, and the issues of language that it raised, were crucial. Dealing with these issues became a major part of their strategy to reform British science, and it involved opening up the scientific community to French and German research. Early in their careers, both Huxley and Tyndall invested time translating science books from the continent into English. Later, as they themselves wrote books that (...) were in demand across the channel, they, and Darwin, put a great deal of time and energy into locating the best possible translators for their writings. Translation was not only a key to reforming British science; it was also essential as a means of circulating the evolutionary worldview of scientific naturalism globally. But Darwin, Huxley, and Tyndall were not fully prepared for the challenges they would encounter in authorizing translations of their own works. (shrink)

In this paper, I consider V. S. Ramachandran's in-principle agnosticism concerning whether neurological studies of religious experience can be taken as support for the claim that God really does communicate with people during religious experiences. Contra Ramachandran, I argue that it is by no means obvious that agnosticism is the proper scientific attitude to adopt in relation to this claim. I go on to show how the questions of whether it is (1) a scientifically testable claim and (2) a (...) plausible hypothesis, serve to open up some important philosophical issues concerning interpretive backgrounds that are presupposed in the assessment of scientific hypotheses. More specifically, I argue that naturalism or scientific objectivism in its various forms is not simply a neutral or default methodological backdrop for empirical inquiry but involves acceptance of a specific ontology, which functions as an implicit and unargued constitutive commitment. Hence, these neurological studies can be employed as a lever with which to disclose something of the ways in which different frameworks of interpretation, both theistic and atheistic, serve differently to structure and give meaning to empirical findings. (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is to articulate a Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism as well as a Foucauldian critique of the nomothetic framework underlying the Placement Problem. My Foucauldian post-structuralist critique of scientific naturalism questions the relations between our society’s imbrication of economic-political power structures and knowledge in a way that also effects some constructive critical alignment between Foucault and Habermas, helping to undermine the traditional view of their respective social critiques as incompatible. First, (...) I will outline a brief genealogical backstory for the rise of scientific naturalism, and I will then reconstruct the Placement Problem. In the second part of the paper, I introduce Foucault’s notion of pouvoir-savoir, namely his account of the interconnection between power and knowledge. I then go on to articulate the Foucauldian critique of scientific naturalism by arguing that the levelling nature of nomothetic rationality and its conservative naturalistic vocabulary involves regulative discourse: anything that resists placeability/locatability is labelled “odd”. By being thus visibly marked, “odd” phenomena become “queer” phenomena, which then become “problematic” phenomena. They are, thereby, construed in need of discipline. Understood in this Foucauldian way, scientific naturalist disciplinarity produces subjected and practised minds, “docile” minds. (shrink)

This paper is a response to Christian Coseru, ‘The Middle Way to Reality: On Why I Am Not a Buddhist and Other Philosophical Curiosities.’ I address Coseru’s critical comments about naturalism, evolutionary psychology, scientific realism, and Madhyamaka philosophy. I argue that scientific naturalism is not the right framework for relating Buddhism to science; rather, the proper framework is the ethics of knowledge. I argue that Coseru’s defence of evolutionary psychology is unconvincing and rests on a misunderstanding (...) of the issues concerning the relations between evolutionary theory, evolutionary psychology, and Buddhist philosophy. Finally, I argue that there are considerable tensions between scientific realism and Buddhist philosophy. (shrink)

The thought of Wilfrid Sellars has figured prominently in recent discussions of the relationship between naturalism and normativity . On the one hand, some have appealed to Sellars' philosophy in defence of the thesis that what he called the normative 'space of reasons' is in some sense sui generis and irreducible to the natural causal order described by the natural sciences. On the other hand, others have exploited equally central aspects of Sellars' philosophy in defence of the seemingly incompatible (...) project of attempting to give an exhaustive scientifically naturalist account of mind and meaning, and perhaps of the nature of normativity itself. I contend that what Sellars described as 'the Janus-faced character of languagings as belonging to both the causal order and the order of reasons' ( Naturalism and Ontology ) is the key to understanding his normative and pragmatist variety of naturalism. Sellars saw himself as having articulated a detailed philosophical perspective within which the normative aspects of meaning, knowledge, truth, and representation are themselves opened up, in principle, to naturalistic explanation. (shrink)

Responding to Mark Harris, I reflect on his tantalizing question whether the provision of naturalistic explanations for biblical miracles renders the narratives more, or less, credible. I address his “reversal,” in which professional scientists now feature among defenders of a literalistic reading, while professional biblical scholars are often skeptical. I suggest this underlines the ambivalence of scientific naturalism from the standpoint of Christian theology. Historical examples are adduced to show that, until the mid‐nineteenth century, naturalistic and theistic explanations (...) were commonly regarded as complementary. Accordingly, the primacy often accorded to scientific progress in accounts of secularization is questionable. Two concluding questions are raised. If a methodological naturalism inheres in biblical scholarship, as in the sciences, how do biblical scholars decide whether the historical trajectories they construct for the composition of biblical texts are destructive or affirmative of faith? Second, when the miracle is the Resurrection of the dead Christ, does not the scientific impossibility of this foundational event remain sacrosanct? (shrink)

This book presents an introduction to the principles of scientific naturalism, which holds that nature is a self-sufficient reality that can be explained by natural causes and laws. Franklin explores the implications of this worldview for our understanding of the world and the place of humanity within it. This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain (...) in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant. (shrink)

How, from a scientific standpoint, should we understand mystical experiences? On the one hand such experiences are obviously capable of being studied scientifically. Nevertheless there is a sense in which such experiences often seem strongly opposed to our ordinary scientific views of reality, for they often seem to point to a domain quite outside that examined by naturalistic empirical science. Indeed, this is often precisely what seems to be ‘mystical’ about them. The present essay takes a hard look (...) at specific question of the possible significance of these experiences for scientific naturalism. (shrink)

The doctrine of Kantian natural piety says that rational human animals are essentially at home in physical nature. In this essay, I apply the doctrine of Kantian natural piety directly to the natural sciences, and especially physics, by showing how they have a cognitive, epistemic, metaphysical, practical/moral, aesthetic/artistic, religious, and sociocultural/political grounding in Kantian sensibility, both pure and empirical. This is what I call Kantian scientific pietism, and it is to be directly and radically opposed to scientific (...) class='Hi'>naturalism. (shrink)

In this essay, I maintain that although atheism, minimally construed, consists simply of the belief that there is no God or gods, atheists must embrace a secular worldview of one kind or another. Since they cannot be without a worldview, atheists must develop an alternative to the religious, especially the theistic, worldviews which they, by implication, reject. Further, I argue that there are, at the very least, two options available to atheists and that these should not be conflated or treated (...) as one and the same. The two options that I explore and distinguish are scientism and secular humanism. I also maintain that the things that might count as good grounds for or against secular or religious worldviews are shaped significantly by whether atheists embrace scientism or secular humanism. (shrink)

One might think at first glance that naturalism excludes any form of theism by definition. This article argues to the contrary that proper scientificity requires that a naturalist remain open to the possibility of the truth of the classical theistic conception of God in particular. The only alternative is for naturalism to devolve into an anti-theistic bias and ideology, forsaking the claim to being properly scientific.

Examining James M. Gustafson's views on the relationships between the sciences, theology, and ethics from a scientifically based naturalistic philosophical perspective, I concur with his rejection of separatist and antagonistic interactionist positions and his adherence to a mutually supportive interactionist position with both descriptive and normative features. I next explore three aspects of this interactionism: religious empiricism, the connections between facts and values, and the centering of objective values in the divine. Here I find much accord between Gustafson's theocentrism and (...) a scientifically based naturalistic philosophical account of the relationships between the sciences, theology, and ethics. (shrink)

Philosophers and scientists both ask questions about what the world is like. How do these fields interact with one another? How should they? Naturalism Beyond the Limits of Science investigates an approach to these questions called methodological naturalism. According to methodological naturalism, when coming up with theories about what the world is like, philosophers should, whenever possible, make use of the same methodology that is deployed by scientists. Although many contemporary philosophers have implicit commitments that lead straightforwardly (...) to methodological naturalism, few have a clear understanding of how widespread and disruptive methodological naturalism promises to be for the field. By way of a series of case studies involving laws of nature, composition, time and modality, and drawing on historical and contemporary scientific developments including the discovery of the neutrino, the introduction of dark energy, and the advent of relativity theory, this book demonstrates the ways in which scientists rely on extra-empirical reasoning and how that very same extra-empirical reasoning can yield surprising results when applied to philosophical debates. Along the way, Nina Emery's investigation illuminates the complex relationship between philosophy and the sciences, and makes the case that philosophers and scientists alike would benefit from a greater understanding of the connections between the two fields. (shrink)

There is much in The Sensory Order that recommends the oft-made claim that Hayek anticipated connectionist theories of mind. To the extent that this is so, contemporary arguments against and for connectionism, as advanced by Jerry Fodor, Zenon Pylyshyn, and John Searle, are shown as applicable to theoretical psychology. However, the final section of this chapter highlights an important disanalogy between theoretical psychology and connectionist theories of mind.

This essay examines Secularism as developed by George Jacob Holyoake in 1851–1852. While historians have noted the importance of evolutionary thought for freethinking radicals from the 1840s, and others have traced the popularization of agnosticism and Darwinian evolution by later Victorian freethinkers, insufficient attention has been paid to mid-century Secularism as constitutive of the cultural and intellectual environment necessary for the promotion and relative success of scientific naturalism. I argue that Secularism was a significant source for the emerging (...) new creed of scientific naturalism in the mid-nineteenth century. Not only did early Secularism help clear the way by fighting battles with the state and religious interlocutors, but it also served as a source for what Huxley, almost twenty years later, termed ‘agnosticism’. Holyoake modified freethought in the early 1850s, as he forged connections with middle-class literary radicals and budding scientific naturalists, some of whom met in a ‘Confidential Combination’ of freethinkers. Secularism became the new creed for this coterie. Later, Secularism promoted and received reciprocal support from the most prominent group of scientific naturalists, as Holyoake used Bradlaugh's atheism and neo-Malthusianism as a foil, and maintained relations with Huxley, Spencer and Tyndall through the end of the century. In Holyoake's Secularism we find the beginnings of the mutation of radical infidelity into the respectability necessary for the acceptance of scientific naturalism, and also the distancing of later forms of infidelity incompatible with it. Holyoake's Secularism represents an important early stage of scientific naturalism. (shrink)

In this paper, I provide the outlines of an alternative metaphilosophical orientation for Continental philosophy, namely, a form of scientific naturalism that has proximate roots in the work of Bachelard and Althusser. I describe this orientation as an “alternative” insofar as it provides a framework for doing justice to some of the motivations behind the recent revival of metaphysics in Continental philosophy, in particular its ecological-ethical motivations. In the second section of the paper, I demonstrate how ecological-ethical issues (...) motivate new metaphysicians like Bruno Latour, Jane Bennett, Timothy Morton, Ian Bogost, and Graham Harman to impute to objects real features of agency. I also try to show how their commitments lead to deep ambiguities in their metaphysical projects. In the final section, I outline a type of scientific naturalism in Continental philosophy that parallels the sort of naturalism championed by Quine, both conceptually and historically, and suggest that it might serve our ecological-ethical purposes better. (shrink)

A collection of original essays offering a comprehensive history of the emergence of scientific naturalism. Beginning with the naturalists of ancient Greece, and proceeding through the middle ages, the scientific revolution, and into the nineteenth century, the contributors examine past ideas about 'nature' and 'the supernatural'. Ranging over different scientific disciplines and historical periods, they show how past thinkers often relied upon theological ideas and presuppositions in their systematic investigations of the world. In addition to providing (...) material that contributes to a history of 'nature' and naturalism, this collection challenges a number of widely held misconceptions about the history of scientific naturalism. (shrink)

The purpose of this paper is threefold: First, I provide a framework – based on Sellars' distinction between the manifest and the scientific image – for illuminating the distinction between liberal and ‘orthodox’ scientific naturalism. Second, I level a series of objections against expanded liberal naturalism and its core commitment to the autonomy of manifest-image explanations. Further, I present a view which combines liberal and scientific naturalism, albeit construed in resolutely non-representationalist terms. Finally, I (...) attempt to distinguish my own (Sellars- and Peirce-inspired) position from the very similar pragmatic liberal naturalist view, that of Huw Price. I do this by suggesting that a ‘monistic’ Peircian evolutionary naturalism which accepts the Sellarsian scientia mensura principle not only is consistent with ungrudging recognition of the irreducibility of normative facts and the plurality of our discursive practices, but also shows how this irreducibility, by being understood in terms of an evolution-by-selection of a population of perceptual-practical-inferential habits, can be at the same time considered as naturalistically explicable – without any appeal to an expanded manifest-image conception of nature. (shrink)

Much ink has been spilt in consideration of the once pervasive reliance on military metaphors to depict the relationships between science and religion in the nineteenth century. This has resulted in historically sensitive treatments of secularization; and the realization that the relationship between science and religion was not a bloody war between intellectual nation states, but a protracted divorce of former partners. Moreover, historians of science have been encouraged to throw off the yoke of the internalism–externalism debate, and to explore (...) the cultural boundaries that impinged upon practitioners of a natural knowledge of the world. Within the historiography of nineteenth-century science, this has resulted in many new perspectives on science and natural knowledge in relation to cultural control and authority. (shrink)

Historians are now generally agreed that the Darwinian recognition and institutionalization of the polygenist position was more than merely nominal.194 Wallace, Vogt, and Huxley had led the way, and we may add Galton (1869) to the list of those leading Darwinians who incorporated a good deal of polygenist thinking into their interpretions of human history and racial differences.195 Eventually “Mr. Darwin himself,” as Hunt had suggested he might, consolidated the Darwinian endorsement of many features of polygenism. Darwin's Descent of Man (...) was published in the same year that the Anthropological Institute was founded, and it was no coincidence that it was broadly congruent with Knoxian/ Anthropological race science. Recent scholarship has stressed the derivative character of the Descent, and Darwin's views on race were clearly influenced by the earlier interpretations of the abovecited Darwinians.196However, although the Descent was written in the light of the anthropological struggles of the 1860s, it is essential to acknowledge its origins in Darwin's notebooks of the late 1830s and early 1840s. A good deal of the congruence between Darwinian and Knoxian conceptions of race may be traced back to these early notebook constructions. As these document, Darwin, like Knox, brought to his very earliest conceptions of human evolution a “commitment to the idea of human races as discrete biological units with distinct moral and mental traits.”197 The young Darwin had been concerned with the same sorts of questions on racial biological and cultural differences that preoccupied Knox around the same time, and he was committed to as ruthless a naturalism. Apart from their individual and independent debts to Quetelet's “moral statistics,” both Darwin and Knox drew heavily on the general themes of struggle and adaptation in the contemporary “common context” of biological and social thought.198 Given their common context, the broad general similarities between the Knoxian laws of race antagonism and subordination and the Darwinian struggle for existence between races need occasion no strained historical explanation of direct influence.199Nevertheless, in more explicit ways, the Descent does show the conflation of Knoxian/Anthropological and Darwinian racial views, and Darwin located his discussion of these issues squarely within the dispute “of late years” between polygenists and monogenists.200 His mature views on race were shaped by the contemporaneous confrontations and negotiations between the Darwinians and the Anthropologicals. It is within this context that the minor historical puzzle of Darwin's failure to acknowledge Knox's “generic descent” may be explained. Apart from the difficulties of integration and interpretation of his scattered theoretical writings, Knox, through his adoption by Hunt and the Anthropologicals, became identified with anti-Darwinism and therefore with antievolutionism.201 Moreover, Knox, the disreputable and marginal “savage radical” and lately resurrected and equally unsavory “Anthropological,” was hardly an acceptable “precursor.” Yet, paradoxically, it was via the antithetical medium of the Anthropological platform that Knox's race science made an indirect and unacknowledged, but lasting, impact on the Darwinian anthropological model.In the Descent, Darwin argued that racial traits arose very early in the prehistory of man, were not biologically adaptive, and were therefore relatively fixed in character. By viewing race formation as a distant and closed episode of human history, Darwin endorsed the Knoxian categories of race as fixed and unalterable types. Although he thought it irrelevant whether human races were called species or subspecies, he conceded more to the Knoxian view than Huxley by granting that a naturalist confronted for the first time by specimens of Negro and European man “might feel himself fully justified in ranking the races of man as distinct species.”202 Consistent with the Knoxian interpretation, struggle, competition, and survival occurred between racial units rather than between individuals and, in Darwin's view, accounted for the superiority of the Anglo-Saxon and the inevitable triumph of the more intellectual and moral races over the lower and more degraded ones.Darwin was as insistent as Knox on the biological basis of intellectual and moral differences, and, through his tendency to reduce social and cultural differences to biology, he maintained the essential Knoxian/Anthropological link between race and culture.203 For above all, the Descent did much more than offer a naturalistic explanation of human evolution: it proffered social interpretation, justification, and prescription, and its timely appearance gave a powerful boost to the “moralizing naturalism” of Huxley and Galton, and to Spencer's “Social Darwinism.”204 We may draw a straight line from Knox's “moral anatomy,” through Hunt's “anthropology,” and on to “Social Darwinism” and the “social surgeons” of the eugenics movement.The Darwinians did not, of course, we their tendency to naturalize existing economic and social relations to Knox or Hunt and the Anthropologicals—they were simply reflecting the same general intellectual trend that had affected Knox and the Anthropologicals as well. And in the larger context, the forces that had created a climate receptive to Knox's racism had intensified: in the seventies, the need to justify white imperialism and class and racial inequalities was greater than ever. Scientific racism no longer appeared an aberration but the very essence of the scientific study of man, taking on a newfound respectability in the “new” evolutionary anthropology. But in more specific ways, through the struggle between the Darwinians and Anthropologicals for scientific and ideological hegemony, Knox's “moral anatomy” was institutionalized and perpetuated in late Victorian scientific racism. In the process, the delicate balance that Knox had maintained between his radicalism and his racism was outweighed by conservative institutional and social needs, and his “moral anatomy” was retooled — first by Hunt, and then by the Darwinians — to fit those needs. (shrink)

How can we understand the world as a whole instead of separate natural and human realms? Joseph T. Rouse proposes an approach to this classic problem based on radical new conceptions of both philosophical naturalism and scientific practice.