What is Naturalism? Towards a Univocal Theory
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Jonathan Knowles
Abstract
‘Naturalism’ is not in contemporary analytical philosophy a very precise idea, but rather embraces a range of distinct though related views. The paper seeks to argue that all naturalistic philosophical positions must in fact end up having a fairly univocal kind of content if they are to be coherent and defensible. I present first what I see as an essentially Quinean conception of naturalism, in which the position is understood negatively and reactively in relation to the failures of first philosophy to ground natural science, issuing in the idea that ‘science is the measure of all things’ (as Sellars put it). I go on to argue that though naturalism can be no more than this, it is not an empty or uninteresting position. Any science-internal attempt rationally to ground science is flawed since incoherent. On the other hand, though there is no strict demarcation to be had of what is scientific and what not (either metaphysical or methodological), there is a dialectical instability in what I call ‘non-scientific’ (i.e non-natural scientific) naturalism, in view of its general deference to science, together with certain recent developments in the cognitive sciences. I conclude by sketching some further avenues of debate concerning the naturalism issue.
© Philosophia Press 2008
Articles in the same Issue
- Evil Everywhere. The Ordinariness of Kantian Radical Evil
- What is Naturalism? Towards a Univocal Theory
- Wittgenstein and the Fate of Metaphysics
- Butler's Unduly Worry about Foucault. The Paradoxically Constituted and Constructed Body
- On the Performative and the Pragmatic. Performative vs. Pragmatic Self-Contradictions
- Philosophical Fiction and the Act of Fiction-Making
- On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Challenge to Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art
- Less is More, and More is Needed. Reply to Jan Faye
- Nothing but the Truth. A Reply to Søren Harnow Klausen
- John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer & Luca Pocci (eds.): A Sense of the Worlds. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. New York & London: Routledge, 2007 (344 pp.)
Articles in the same Issue
- Evil Everywhere. The Ordinariness of Kantian Radical Evil
- What is Naturalism? Towards a Univocal Theory
- Wittgenstein and the Fate of Metaphysics
- Butler's Unduly Worry about Foucault. The Paradoxically Constituted and Constructed Body
- On the Performative and the Pragmatic. Performative vs. Pragmatic Self-Contradictions
- Philosophical Fiction and the Act of Fiction-Making
- On Richard Shusterman's Pragmatist Challenge to Arthur Danto's Philosophy of Art
- Less is More, and More is Needed. Reply to Jan Faye
- Nothing but the Truth. A Reply to Søren Harnow Klausen
- John Gibson, Wolfgang Huemer & Luca Pocci (eds.): A Sense of the Worlds. Routledge Studies in Contemporary Philosophy. New York & London: Routledge, 2007 (344 pp.)
