Phenomenology and Naturalism: Editors' Introduction (original) (raw)
2013, Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement
and Nature: Examining the Relationship between Phenomenology and Naturalism', points to a problem that, like many fundamental problems in philosophy, is at once strikingly contemporary and classical: how can we account for the place of human experience in nature when the special sciences that have emerged from experience to study nature seem unable to situate it? Questions about the relationship between consciousness and the natural world have been at the centre of many philosophical debates: how can we relate first-and third-person data? Is it possible to explain exhaustively, or at all, consciousness in naturalistic terms? Although these questions have been the driving force of much recent philosophical work, one issue in particular has been underexplored within this broad field: what is the relationship between phenomenology (as a philosophical method for describing lived experience) and the broadly accepted idea that philosophy should be consistent with a naturalistic worldview. Put otherwise, how does human thought think about a nature that by its own account precedes it; how can we think a world without thought? These are two sides of the same question. On the one hand, we ask: how do we think about experience or consciousness as located in nature? And on the other hand, how do we think about what exceeds or transcends thought, but does not exclude it (or rather contains it), namely nature? These questions have emerged in various registers and in different traditions throughout the history of philosophy and have taken on a particular poignancy with the rise of modern science and the naturalistic worldview that underpins it. But they all ultimately refer to a seemingly intractable ontological problem that has played a large role in the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to Kant and Heidegger: what is the
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