Liberal Naturalism, Ordinary Things and the Importance of Second-Personal Space (original) (raw)

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.

Toward a Broader Conception of "Liberal Naturalism": Widening the Perspective

Synthesis philosophica, 2021

The term “naturalism” is often used to refer to reductive naturalism and is thus closely linked to physicalism. As an alternative to reductive naturalism, various forms of liberal naturalism have been developed. This paper argues that a further widening of the concept of “naturalism” is helpful. A “broad” liberal naturalism is advocated, where the criterium for “naturalistic” is not linked to the premise of a specific metaphysics, but instead to that which arguably constitutes naturalism as such: the presence of universal fundamental principles on how the world operates and of regularities or laws of nature describing the concrete behavior of the world. This type of naturalism allows for the inclusion of non-materialistic metaphysics, such as forms of dualism and idealism. This finding is significant, since the physicalist position falls short on several issues, most notably the adequate handling of the problem of consciousness. Given the positive connotations of the predicate “naturalistic,” such an inclusion seems helpful in legitimizing potentially fruitful research into less conventional alternatives to physicalism and materialism. Further, this might well turn out to be of value not only from a theoretical or academic perspective but from an existential standpoint as well.

Naturalism, Normativity, and Explanation: The Scientistic Biases of Contemporary Naturalism

Metaphilosophy, 1993

The critical focus of this paper is on a claim made explicitly by Gilbert Harman and accepted implicitly by numerous others, the claim that naturalism supports concurrent defense of scientific objectivism and moral relativism. I challenge the assumptions of Harman's 'argument from naturalism' used to support this combination of positions, utilizing. Hilary Putnam's 'companions in guilt' argument in order to counter it. The paper concludes that while domainspecific anti-realism is often warranted, Harman's own views about the objectivity of facts and the subjectivity of values are better seen as stemming from scientistic ideals of knowledge than from dictates of naturalism. Scientists qua scientists make value judgments, and setting aside scientistic assumptions and unrealizable conceptions of scientific objectivity should lead us to more symmetrical metaphilosophical conception of epistemic and ethical normativity than that which underlies Harman's account.

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.

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