Liberal Naturalism and the Scientific Image of the World (original) (raw)
Related papers
Critical naturalism for the human sciences
Handbook of Liberal Naturalism, 2020
Naturalism is a central issue in philosophy, and has been for the longest time, albeit with widely different construals, linked to widely different contexts. But it has come to the fore in the last half-century or so for a reason: the heretofore non-naturalist majority opinion came under attack from two sides. On one side were philosophers armed with conceptual analyses purporting to show that what came to be known as scientific naturalism is the correct position, whether as an ontological or an epistemological doctrine. On the other were formal and empirical scientists with a scientific research agenda aiming at uncovering natural processes and states of affairs to which, one by one, the tenets of non-natural understanding, whether lay or scientific, could be identified, on pain of being altogether eliminated.
Towards a Reformed Liberal and Scientific Naturalism
Dialectica, 2019
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.
The Rise of Naturalism and Its Problematic Role in Science and Culture
The Nature of Nature: Examining the Role of Naturalism in Science, 2011
It is worthwhile reflecting on how philosophical naturalism rose to its contemporary place of hegemony not just in the sciences, but in the academy in general. It was not always so. The institution of the university was an invention of medieval Christianity and modern science itself was birthed out of a Judeo-Christian worldview, a truth that has been lost in the current landscape of whiggish tales about the backwardness of the Middle Ages and the “warfare” between science and religion that supposedly began with the Enlightenment. A corrective is in order. I will begin with a concise reflection on the very possibility of rational explanation in the context of naturalism, arguing that it is a woefully deficient context for the scientific enterprise both metaphysically and epistemologically. I will then develop a historico-philosophical etiology of the rise of naturalism and correct a variety of egregious historical misconceptions, all by way of a general argument that the current ontological and methodological foundations for the pursuit of scientific truth are misconceived, counterproductive, and in dire need of reconstitution on transcendent grounds.
Naturalism in Question Edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur
Philosophical Books, 2006
Here is a strong intuition: [I]n the dimension of describing and explaining the world, science is the measure of all things, of what is that it is, and of what is not that it is not. (Wilfrid Sellars, 'Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind', in Science, Perception and Reality (Ridgeview, 1963), §41, p. 173) This is known as Sellars's scientia mensura dictum. And who would want to disagree? There is a massive intuitive appeal to its metaphysical tidiness. And to its lack of philosophical pretension. There is a methodological lesson to be found here: when we want to understand 'what there is', our methods and explanatory resources must be continuous with those of the natural sciences. And an ontological: we must reject an a priori metaphysics that invokes unmoved moving first principles, forms, or a substance inaccessible to scientific investigation. The natural world is whatever the natural sciences adopt as a going concern. At the core of this intuition is an orthodox naturalistic ontology. However intuitive this might appear to the contemporary philosopher, the papers collected in this volume all question the consequences this has for accounts of key phenomena such as science itself, the mind, agency, ethics, and personal identity. It is a remarkably congenial collection of papers by a distinguished line-up of philosophers. All but two of the entries are published here in English for the first time. There are papers on the naturalistic (mis-)conception of science by Barry Stroud, John Dupré, Hilary Putnam, and Huw Price. The papers on the problematic role of orthodox naturalism in the philosophy of mind are written by John McDowell, David Macarthur, Akeel Bilgrami, and Donald Davidson. There are contributions on the consequences of the socalled constricted conception of 'nature' and 'naturalism' for an account of agency and freedom by
In this remarks I reflect on naturalism faced with the challenge of the humanities / culture / artificiality, first via the case of cabinets of natural history. Natural history is the (immediately pre-Darwinian) to understand Nature as a whole, including the place of humans in Nature. Dispositifs such as zoos, curiosity cabinets and their near-cousin, natural history cabinets were an integral part of this approach to Nature. In Diderot’s Encyclopédie article “Cabinet d’histoire naturelle”, I examine the interplay between materialism and the recognition of the irreducible nature of artifice, in order to arrive at a provisional definition of Diderot’s vision of Nature as “une femme qui aime à se travestir.” How can a materialist metaphysics in which the concept of Nature has a normative status, also ultimately consider it to be something necessarily artificial? Historically, the answer to this question involves the project of natural history. I then turn to the case for how materialism is not necessarily blind to artificiality, as regards the brain. Here, the brain belongs to the symbolic realm, and its plasticity embeds it in the world of culture. If the brain is (always) already social then the gulf separating Natur- and Geisteswissenschaften, disappears in a puff of smoke. Cabinets of natural history and cultured brains (a.k.a. brains in development) turn out to be (a) part of a parcel of a thriving materialism and (b) irreducibly embedded in the sphere of representations, phantasmagorias and creation
2017
Contemporary naturalism is changing and scientific reductionism is under challenge from those who advocate a more comprehensive outlook. This special issue of Telos, based on the first Telos Australia Symposium held at Swinburne University in Melbourne in February 2014, introduces some of the key questions in the current debates. It also poses the question of whether more satisfactory political and social thought can be produced if scientific reductionism is replaced by a richer and more hermeneutical naturalism, one that takes more account of philosophical anthropology, actual co-involvements of human beings and their environments, and the potential of more naturalistically grounded approaches to culture. The contemporary naturalist challenge is to overcome the one sided and predominantly mechanistic naturalism coming from seventeenth century Europe. At one level, this is a philosophical issue about how best to interpret the natural sciences and the world to which they relate. At another level, however, it is about developing a rationalism capable of providing a basis for ethics, education and aesthetics. If our civilization continues to uncritically accept mechanistic and reductionist versions of naturalism, then it is unlikely to be able to solve the massive problems that confront it---from economic development to international security to climate change. On the other hand, if a richer and more inclusive naturalism can be developed without losing the explanatory purchase and knowledge accumulation characteristic of the modern natural sciences, then we may be able to overcome the agnosticism about goals and values that deforms the contemporary West.